Is my hard drive dead???

Factual Questions
1

My computer has been acting strange for the past few days. Rebooting on it’s own, freezing even when there arn’t any programs running etc… Okay, no big deal I thought. Then it started happening more and more often (mind you, this is over the past 48 hours) and today when I would reboot it, it would ask for a system disk. So I’m guessing the hard drive is crashing. I went to the Seagate site (the manufacturer or the HD) and downloaded there diagnostic utility. Here’s some of the excerpts from it:
File structure Test Result:
Partition 1 (FAT 32 (4.7gb)) Result: Critical Errors
10 critical structure errors
1 non critical structure error

Error summary
DIR structures     10
Invalid free space value 1

Partition 2 (NTFS (115.2 B)) Result : Failed with critical errors.

ATA full test result : Failed
If neccesary I can copy and past the entire log, but I figured I would start with just a few pieces of it. BTW the HD isn’t making any strange noises. I’m really not sure what to think here. If it is the HD though, I have two questions. First, would I be safe to just copy the entire drive to a new one? Second, can anyone recommend good software to do this with. I do have another computer I can use to make the transfer and I’m more the capable of hooking up the drives. For some reason I get the feeling it’s going to be more the a copy . command to do this. I should mention that I’m willing to actually buy software rather then use iffy free/shareware. One more thing. I did run adaware and Norton AV.

2

It does sound like your hard drive is bad. I would buy another one ASAP while you can still salvage the data. New hard disks often come with an imaging program that does a direct copy from one to the other including the operating system. I bought a new Seagate HD recently and it included the software. Copying from the old one went smoothly.

3

What Shagnasty says. If it’s acting funny, salvage your important data immediately. Once you’ve got that you can try some simple stuff first like running CHKDSK to find and repair any problems.

If like most of us you just keep a folder or two with all of your junk in it, it’s simple enough to copy and you don’t need any special apps to do it.

However if you have critical info all over the place, or just don’t want to have to reinstall everything all over again, you can do a complete copy. “Ghost” is a very handy app for this, it’ll clone your old hard drive to a new one. Once that is done you can take out the old drive, leave the new one as primary and pick up where you left off.

The potential downside that I can see there is if there’s corrupt files or a bad data structure or something on the existing drive it could get cloned right over.