S.M.A.R.T. status BAD!

That's what my computer said at startup, and it wouldn't go any further. However, if I ran the system restore (which took about 2 hours, and had about 150 popups that said something was missing when copying files) everything ran fine.

Windows Hardware 9627 This topic was started by ,


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That's what my computer said at startup, and it wouldn't go any further.
 
However, if I ran the system restore (which took about 2 hours, and had about 150 popups that said something was missing when copying files) everything ran fine...until i shut the computer down again. Now that screen showing the S.M.A.R.T. status comes up, and it doesn't go any further.
 
So, we had our computer taken away, and we're having the hard drive replaced.
 
The question I have is...if the SMART status is bad...but that screen shows up...that must mean the hard drive is working somewhat, right? If so...would it be easy to save files from the hard drive? Excel & Word Docs, music, etc. that were on that hard drive? We told them to try and save the whole My Documents folder if they could...but i'm sitting here worrying, wondering if they'll be able to do it. I don't trust them (The PC-repair people) knowing that if they run the system restore, they can have the computer running fine again until they shut it down, which in that time they could backup the files. Is there another way (more technical-savvy?) that PC people can do to save files from a damaged hard drive?
 
Basically, I need someone to ease my worrying of losing any and every document I had. haha
 
I should also add that the first time this message came up, i could hit F2 to continue, and it would load as normal. Unfortunately, when I got the computer on after that, power went out, down goes the computer. The 2nd time it came up, I hit F2 to continue, it would go to the Windows XP is starting screen, go blank, and restart over again on it's own. That's when we decided we needed to call someone.

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3867 Posts
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Joined 2000-02-04
SMART monitors many things about your HD. Depending on the BIOS it will actually show the different items that it monitors but usually you'll either have to load your Diagnostic Floppy/CD to see where exactly your HD has gone wrong. From your post it's hard to tell but if you were able to boot up then it's quite likely that your data can be recovered.