BIOS and Windows are both telling Margie she's Dooooomed.
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Your hard drive is slowly dying, and it is letting you know.
SMART is hard drive auto diagnostic. It is predicting a hard drive failure due to time.
Predictable failures result from slow processes such as mechanical wear and gradual degradation of storage surfaces. Monitoring can determine when such failures are becoming more likely (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.)
She is not doomed right now, but it will come. The best thing to do is to back up your stuff and have a hard drive ready to replace when doom comes.
Current computer was bought almost four years ago (https://hill-kleerup.org/blog/2009/08/09/best-buy-and-another-pc-purchase.html). She could probably use a replacement — though I'd pull out the larger PSU and graphics card that got installed — but she really doesn't want to have to reinstall everything.
Data is all backed up (via Backblaze, huzzah!), but program reinstall and configuration is not a happy thing when you aren't planning already to do it.
That's what I had a sense of. Unfortunately, +Grégory Moix, it's her C-drive so it's not just a matter of slapping in a new hard drive. Might need to act more proactively.
If it isn't too bad yet you should be able to just clone the whole drive. Or is it pretty bad?
I've not cloned a system/boot drive before.
I recommend clonezilla Very easy to use 🙂
Copywipe is a dead simple program that I have used for years to copy c drives.
MUO is always a go-to for things like this. http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-clone-your-hard-drive/
Clonezilla will work fine. If you don't mind spending a bit o'cash then I also recommend Acronis. In a pinch you can always use Microsoft's built-in ImageX, but it's slow as hell and a bit harder to use.
All of that said, there is something to recommend in a fresh install. Cleans out crap you've not used in a while along with any unknown malware that may have snuck by your defenses. Plus a nice clean registry makes things speedy until you clutter it up again.
Also, a Google search will give you tons of guides on how to clone a disk.
I agree with the clean install advice of +Les Jenkins if you have the time. It does take longer, but at least you have a clean slate to build your system with no crapware installed. (Try install it from an official windows medium, avoid OEM install with lots of software/commercial trial/crap)
Thanks for the advice, all. I agree fully with the idea of starting from scratch — but that's also a lot of back-end work to reinstall and re-key and re-configure everything that Margie does want. Sometimes moving into a new house is the best idea, sometimes repairing the water damage and unpacking everything again is best. I'll take a look at the above ideas and see what makes most sense.
Hrm. Reading through the Clonezilla docs and … it's, frankly, pretty much Greek to me. That seems fairly dangerous.
Spinrite might also help here. https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
If time, cash, and patience allow, clean install and/or new hard drive is best.
+Lorne Lehrer is correct, this is exactly what Spinrite does best. Run it on the drive, and periodically and continue to make backups. Replace when Spinrite can no longer do anything with it. Spinrite is a tenacious program what will recover data easily when others will not even see the drive. The reason is two fold. It has it own OS and it talks directly to the BIOS and drive hardware. It is written in 100% assembler. Yeah… Assembler. That is why the program is ridiculously small.
The next full update that will come for free to purchasers of the current version will be much faster, run on Mac and PC out of the box and completely bypass the OS and BIOS and talk directly to all drive hardware.
…and the NSA. (Just Kidding!)
Oh, man … I'd forgotten all about SpinRite (reasonable, since I probably last ran it about 15-20 years ago), but I was a huge fan of it back in the day when I did PC Crikey. Too late now, sadly.
So interim report — went ahead and bought a new drive for Margie. The Seagates come with an utility disk that will allow cloning (powered by Acronis, +Les Jenkins), so that's what I'm doing at the moment. Crossing fingers …
I was going to come back and mention that both Seagate and Western Digital have versions of Acronis you can use so long as at least one of the drives being cloned is of the brand in question. Acronis is dirt simple to use and will even automatically enlarge partitions if the target drive is bigger than the source drive.
That is, apparently, what is happening. Running into a few unreadable sectors, but doing okay beyond that.
Still might be a good idea to run Spinrite on the drive to be cloned before you copy it. I realize that the ship has sailed already, but it might be good to start over if you run into serious problems
Will make a note of that.
The clone process has completed and the machine seems to be working properly. Unfortunately I can't seem to make the BIOS ignore the old drive (now F/G), so I'll still have to pop the case to pull it.
But not today. 🙂
Thanks to everyone for their assistance.
Is it booting off the new drive?
Yuppers. Got that taken care of, as well as remapping the new physical drive to C/D. But the SMART scan is still noting the old drive(s) as bad. So I still need to yank that hardware.