Should I Replace the Hard Drive?

Here is a question asked in Yahoo Answers:

Q: I’ve had my computer for about a year and 5 months, a Dell Inspiron 1750. Yesterday I turned on my computer and Windows loaded fine. I tried to open mozilla firefox and it completely froze, leaving me with an arrow when I hovered over my desktop and a “waiting” circle on my bottom toolbar. I turned it off manually and turned it back on and now all it does is say “windows is loading files” and will go to the normal windows 7 login screen, but it’s all stretched, the arrow is bigger than normal, and no login or option to enter my password comes up. I’ve used F8 numerous times on other computers and I can always get to restore it that way, but on my computer it sends me to a blue screen “diagnostic test” and says that the hard drive failed the test. I don’t believe this was a virus or anything because my computer was scanning the night before and didn’t find anything, I believe it was just doing what computers do which is stop working on you when you least expect it.

I don’t know if I should spend the money to replace my hard drive on this 1.5 year old computer and risk something else breaking on it in the near future since I do use it everyday OR if I should buy a brand new computer that is cheap (around $500) but not a piece of junk.

 

Here are two answers to the question from Yahoo members:

A1: If it was me, I’d download a decent Linux, or Rescatux or one of the other rescue type programs, and boot that. Use the Disk Utility program that comes with Linux to thoroughly test the hard drive. If it finds any problems, backup all your data somewhere and then try reinstalling Windows (yuck, I know) from either a restore partition on the HD or backup disks (you made them, right?) and all will be back to new condition. If the rest of your HD is OK. Option B is to install the Linux you downloaded in place of Windows and learn to use that. If your HD test shows many errors, time for a new HD; you can install Windows from your install disk MAYBE, and activate it using the number on the sticker on the case. (Or, in half an hour, you could have Linux running on it.)

A2: If the windows recovery diagnostic test reported that your hard drive has failed, then it probably has.

You should get another hard drive. There is no reason to buy a new computer. Just get any 3.5in sata drive and plug it in and you’re good to go.
However, you won’t have an operating system any more; you would have to either buy Windows again (bad), or burn or buy recovery disks for the insperon 1750.

 

Hard drive broken can be a serious problem as  forgot Windows password if the data is not backed up. If you have any opinions about this question, please leave a comment.