As I power on the computer, it goes through my motherboard start up, but stays at the motherboard start up for around 3 minutes. It then states “4th Master hard drive error S.M.A.R.T Press F1 to resume.” I only have one hard drive and i had restarted my computer after a driver update, and then this happened. Did my driver update somehow completely mess up my hard drive?
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Once a drive starts to cough up error messages assorted.. time to consider – seriously – replacing it.
The longer you leave it the greater the likelihood of it crashing at a very critical moment; and possibly taking all your files with it. Don’t go down that road – safeguard data etc – and if possible make an image of the drive; then replace it.
If you replace it whilst it’s still “working” then you can clone the drive to the new one and then install the new drive etc. Again you will likely have to re-activate your OS due to the change of hard drive; but that’s not usually an issue.
Drive manufacturers either provide a free cloning utility with the new drive, or have it available on their website for download. Typically it’s a cut down version of Acronis.