[Jblade]

I just got a PC from my Dad that he wasn't using anymore, he said he was having trouble with the hard-drive but "reinstalling windows fixed it". I had a problem with it yesterday when it crashed on desktop load and I had to restart, but it worked ok after that.

Today when I plugged in a wifi dongle (connecting it to the net via cable isn't possible, all the net sockets are downstairs and we can't have wires around the place) the PC crashed, and even when I restarted it it only got to the windows 7 loading screen and froze there. I took out the wifi, then it flashed a blue error screen for about half a second before going black. Turning it on did nothing, it froze again at the very first bootup screen so I removed the other USB stuff, turned it on again, and it started and went into the repair mode screen.

I've told it to try a startup repair and it says it can take over an hour, but it must of been going for about 3 hours now. I did some looking online and some people are saying it shouldn't take that long and others are saying it took several consecutive days. Electric is too expensive for me to leave this thing running that long, and it's very possible it'll just do it again anyways even if it did work this time.

Should I cut my losses, turn it off, and then look into replacing the harddrive, or just have some patience for longer? Considering I got it for free I don't mind buying a new hard drive, but on the other hand I don't have large amounts of money so I don't want to have to get one if it's not neccesary. It's still doing it right now and I'm posting from my laptop so I don't know if I'll be able to access anything from the PC.

I'm ashamed to say I've been using a PC for well over a decade now and I'm still very new to the hardware side of using things (in my defence, I've never had much money so I've never really been able to try and build one myself)

[Kathy]

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
/HDD/Diagnosis/MHDD32
/Memory/Memtest86+

[Jeff]

Another thing you can do is check the SMART status of the hard drive using this. It will tell you whether it's failing or not (should say "bad" instead of "good"). SMART is normally turned on by default in the BIOS. I do recall when I had a failing drive it was acting similar to yours. Would take forever to do things (shouldn't take 3 hours to do a startup repair, 5 minutes tops). I even recall Windows spitting out an error saying the hard drive is about to fail. Sounds to me like there's an issue with the read/write heads if it takes that long to do stuff.

[Jblade]

Jeff, on 09 August 2013 - 09:13 AM, said:

Another thing you can do is check the SMART status of the hard drive using this. It will tell you whether it's failing or not (should say "bad" instead of "good"). SMART is normally turned on by default in the BIOS. I do recall when I had a failing drive it was acting similar to yours. Would take forever to do things (shouldn't take 3 hours to do a startup repair, 5 minutes tops). I even recall Windows spitting out an error saying the hard drive is about to fail. Sounds to me like there's an issue with the read/write heads if it takes that long to do stuff.

I've just played with it a bit more and there's a utility installed which'll let me access the S.M.A.R.T data, I'll take a look at it and see what's up. Thanks!

EDIT: managed to do a SMART test and got an error code of 0F00:065D, which googling tells me the hard drive is indeed failing. At least they're not too hard/expensive to replace.