When Vista Detects A Hard Drive Problem, It Means It!

Not too long ago, my work machine started showing these error messages. I called our service desk and asked about them, they told me I should probably consider backing things up, but I could ignore the errors.

Yeah, right. I got out my copy of Spinrite. When I went to run Spinrite against my drive, I was presented with a RED screen with a warning about my drive being in imminent danger of failuer according to the SMART subsystem. The recomendation was to back up any data I could before running Spinrite as the process could push the drive over the edge.

Of course, I immediately rebooted back into Vista and started backing things up. During the process, I kept getting these error messages, but as far as I know, I got all the data off the drive before an imminent failure occured. Whew!

Those “drive failures” may explain why I had periodic BSODs under Windows XP on this same machine. It also demonstrates a useful feature in Vista. Good thing I didn’t ignore the warning.