So a little while ago, my hard drive was seeming a bit nanged. I’ve got myself a laptop running Windows 7, and every so often it would crash on boot. Sometimes it’d just hang and I’d have to restart, then it would recommend I run a disc recovery thing which never found any problems. Other times, more worryingly, it would just print out some DOS-looking low res text saying something like “Disc read failure, hit any key to recoverFZH`[sic]”.
My important stuff is backed up, so I’m not too terrified of this, but it was getting more frequent and annoying, so I went and bought an external hard drive so I could make a full backup of my internal one, so when it seemingly inevitably eats it, I can get back to where I was without as much faffing around as might otherwise be indicated. So I run the windows disk backup kajigger, which takes ages (like, fourteen hours or something to back up a 320GB HDD). And then… the problem is gone. It hasn’t crashed on startup since then - it used to happen maybe one in every three or four times, and now it hasn’t happened in about two weeks (and I start up my computer maybe twice a day or more).
Any idea what happened here, Dopers? The only thing I can think of is that the windows backup thing automatically does some routine maintenance (like a defrag or something?) that perturbed the problem out of existence. Alternatively, maybe my hard drive was always fine, and Windows detected that I hadn’t backed it up properly and was faking crashes at boot time to scare me into backing it up. Obviously that second explanation is the one I prefer to believe but I’m also interested in explanations that aren’t completely made up. 