Help with father's Compaq

[shadowrowin]

My father owns a Compaq Presario. It runs windows xp, which i know is a rather poor OS, but thats not the issue we are facing. This computer is at least 5 years old, and has been slowing down alot. I checked it out and CPU and Memory are fine, yet I get the failing HD code when i run the HD and Basic tests of HD 521 - 2w.

My father tells me that code is something he got about a year and a half ago, which doesn't make sense to me if the issue is actually a failing hard drive. Shouldn't it have crapped out by now?

If I do a total system restore, will that override this issue, or does my father indeed have to cough up about 50 for a new HD?

Edit: Everything still works on the computer, just really slowly.

Edit 2: Found out the year of the pc. It's a 2006, if that helps.

[Thomas K]

Something I experienced a few times.

I had a old Bigfoot hard drive that decided to die.. sloooowly.

It would get i/o input output errors
Read/write errors

This was pretty much the days before S.M.A.R.T. logging and utilities.

Of course, I had the benefit of running linux of the time, and I saw every time the OS or myself would try to access something on that hard drive the errors would come up.  Depending on how big the sector is, and how large the section is that has the errors, it can slow you down significantly, or almost not at all.  In my case, the moment I logged into Linux, I'd get these errors endlessly, and if I was lucky, 30 minutes in It would clear up. 

How this translates to Microsoft operating systems is simple. The operating system simply keeps trying until it fails.  Remember the old 'retry/abort/fail' messages in dos?  Windows simply defaults to 'retry' until it decides, in my experience to 'fail' or 'abort' the process. Unfortunately you get nothing visually, except long wait and lag in data access.

Seeing as the computer, the operating system lands data at random for the most part on the hard drive, its hard to say, without a chkdsk, or scandisk to lock out those damaged areas (or more recent HD tools).

If you manage to move the data, defrag it, to another location,  you might run 5 years without problems, or 1 hour, or 1 minute, depending on the OS.  Figure on replacing the hard drive, now, and move the data over that you want to save.

Good Luck

[shadowrowin]

there isnt any data that is really worth saving on the computer. Would a system restoration be worth the few hours it would take to complete?

[James_PCD]

Was the failing test a SMART test or one of the scan/read tests?  If the failing test was not SMART than the failure indicates that there are bad sectors on the drive.  As such, the drive can still be used.  If the failed test was SMART, the drive would be failing and would most likely not have lasted this long.

If there isn't any data worth saving then a system restore could be worth it.  HP's restore tool is one of the better ones I have used in the past.

Good luck!