# Interersting hard drive health non-problem

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interersting-hard-drive-health-non-problem/582670>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [May 21, 2011, 12:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interersting-hard-drive-health-non-problem/582670 "2011-05-21T12:06:27Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Dinaroozie](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e9c0ed/32.png) [@Dinaroozie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dinaroozie)\
**Post date:** [May 21, 2011, 12:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/interersting-hard-drive-health-non-problem/582670/1 "2011-05-21T12:06:27Z")

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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. 🙂