Hi
I just turned on my computer and a screen came on that said the above.It told me to hit F10 and run a DPS self test. I did and it failed.
I then did a backup of my drive. How long do I have till my computer goe's to heaven ?
Please help. I've never had this happen before on any computer I owned.Also could a virus cause this ? I've been having problems with Microsoft Security Essentials where it wouldn't update and also system restore wouldn't work and I couldn't update Windows.
Cathy

Sounds like it's time for a new hard drive, I just went through this on a laptop a several weeks ago. In my case it was a SMART failure, one of the counters exceeded a threshold. If you buy a replacement drive before the old one completely fails you can usually clone the drive.

The procedures for cloning are different depending on which interface (SATA or PATA) your drive uses.

As an alternative, most PC's these days ship with restore media. If you want to start off clean, you can restore the new drive to an off the shelf state. You can mount the old drive either internally or externally to restore you data.

Either way, it sounds like you need to purchase a new HDD.

Thank you. I'm taking it to my computer guy tomorrow morning. With the backup on the same HDD,will I be able to just use that and put it on the new hdd ? He has the cables and stuff to do it with.

It depends on whether the part of the drive the backup is on has gone bad.
If it's too far gone to use the normal way, there is still disc recovery software such as SpinRite that can often get the drive readable enough to restore from it. Your computer guy may have something like that.

Hi
Back from my puter guy. He was able to clone my hdd. I bought a new terrabyte drive.A usb mouse (first one I've ever had)and he installed it and cleaned out my computer of the dust bunnies,all for the low price of $140. That is a pretty good deal here in Canada. The mouse is so cool. I've been using the one with the ball for the last 11 years. I'm still getting use to this one. I had to turn down the speed to slow and it's still 3 times as fast as my old one.

Cathy

Almost sounds like you have a "new" computer! I stopped using the ball mice so many years ago, I've forgotten when. I just got tired of taking them apart and cleaning out the crud all the time. Have fun!

Thanks Drac. I will and I am.

Good to hear things are okay now, Cathy. Yeah, USB mice are neat to use.

Normally,how long doe's a terrebyte hard drive last ? I never had a hdd fail on me before.

How long a drive lasts before failing doesn't have anything to do with the size. I've got a couple of ancient old 40 GB drives that are still working after 10 years. My old HP hard drive from 2004 is still working as are my three 500 GB hard drives that are 4 years old.

Hard drives are mechanical and involve a spinning disk, so movement = wear and tear. Solid state drives have no mechanical moving parts. Answer is, "who knows!"

Thanks Drac.