win8 Windows 8 Crashing

[startrek1997]

Hello People,

I got a copie of windows 8 pro for xmas from my dad. I installed it and all was fine untill this past weekend. I was playing minecraft iwth a friend of mine and i got Blue screen of death. I was like ok it only did it 1 time. Well come to find out i will keep crashing when i am trying to read/write good sized files to the HDD. My question is my HDD dieing? I have run HDD checking software and they are all giveing me a caution sign.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Matt

[Brandon H Supervisor]

laptop or tower?

i ask because if it's a tower it could also just be the sata cord going bad

[startrek1997]

laptop

[Karl L.]

Your symptoms could be caused for any number of reasons, but a failing hard drive is a reasonable guess. There are a number of tools to read the SMART status from your hard disk so you can find out for sure. HWiNFO is a good, free utility you can run in Windows to read your disk's SMART status, as well as a plethora of other hardware-related system information.

[startrek1997]

i have most of them are telling me "caution".

[Jose_49]

i have most of them are telling me "caution".

What is the brand of the laptop? Was it purchased on 2012?

It seems it's a faulty hard drive and needs to be replaced.

[startrek1997]

nope this is a dell inspirion 1750 about 3 years old. 500gb HDD\

[Karl L.]

The "warning" status you are getting when you read the SMART status from your disk is basically useless. Any application that can read SMART status can choose to rate the drive however the authors see fit; it is an arbitrary rating that doesn't necessarily indicate a problem. Look at the actual data values reported by SMART. In particular, check your "Read Error Rate", "Reallocated Sector Count", "Seek Error Rate", "Power-off Retract Count", and "Current Pending Sector Count". (Those are attributes 1, 5, 7, 192, and 197, respectively.) That should give you a pretty good indication if your drive is failing.

Remember, if SMART reports that your drive is failing, its definitely failing. If SMART reports your drive is OK, it may or may not be failing. SMART can only conclusively determine failure, not fitness.