I had to shut down my computer with the power button without going through "Start > Shut Down" and now it restarts asking me to "Press F1 to continue the restart" because "WARNING: Immediately back up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent. SMART failure predicted on primary slave."
I have not had any problems prior to this with any devices on the computer, except for a faulty ALi PCI USB/Firewire combo card. I have kept this PCI card on the computer because the USB ports work even though the Firewire ports don't.
I have a 40GB Maxtor 34098H4 on the primary master and a 120GB Maxtor 6Y120L0 on the primary slave.
The system event viewer shows multiple "IO_WARNING_PAGING_FAILURE" errors and warnings on "device %1", "The driver disabled the write cache on device \Device\Harddisk1\DR1" (primary slave) and "The driver disabled the write cache on device \Device\Harddisk0\DR0" (primary master).
So far, I have disabled the paging file on the primary slave and set the paging file to system managed on the primary master and uninstalled the PIO mode back to DMA mode 2 on device 0 and device 1 (verified). I plan to check the RAM with memtest86 in a little while. I already had write caching disabled on all drives several months ago.
Just prior to the "hard power down", I was running Google Desktop search and had just installed the latest Windows security updates. My system was cleaned of spyware with Ad-aware and Spybot a few days ago.
I'm wondering if this is a legitimate "predicted failure" on the primary slave or an error as a result of the "hard power-down" perhaps while the system was writing to the paging file.
I really need to back-up all of the 120GB of data on that hard drive (primary slave), but as soon as I start to access a shared folder (main folder) on that drive, the computer reboots! It seems that I can still access all the non-shared folders on that drive, however. How can I rescue all my data off the primary slave before the hard drive fails?
System Specs:
Asus A7V Motherboard
800MHz AMD Duron Processor
640MB RAM
WinXP Pro
Follow-up: After un-sharing the folder via MMC, I am now able to access data on that folder without the computer crashing. But, I'm not convinced that my problem is solved. I still want to back-up my data onto a new external hard drive before the old hard drive fails.
