I am having a bit of trouble.I have 2 hard drives. They are both Western Digital Caviar Blue SATA WD5000AAKX. Recently, a window popped up on my PC saying that a hard drive failure was imminent. I tried to back them up to my 2 TB external hard drive, but the first backup attempt failed, and when the second one was near completion, my computer finally gave in and crashed. Now, whenever I turn on my computer, it shows a black screen with a flashing underscore at the top left for a few seconds, before asking me if I'd like startup repair or to start windows normally. Startup repair/system restore does nothing in the end, and if I attempt to start windows normally, it very sluggishly goes to the 'Starting Windows' screen without the logo. After a few minutes, the windows logo appears and then the computer just hangs there. I left it on for over an hour in this state to see if it might go past this, but I really think it won't.

I tested each of the hard drives individually, by disconnecting one and trying to start the computer with the other. There was no difference in the startup with either of them, however, when I held each hard drive to my ear, they both still 'spin-up' when they are connected and the computer is turned on. One of them seems to 'skip' at intervals based on the noise and the vibrations. I have had this computer since 2012, so I am really not surprised that this has inevitably happened. There were some early warning signs, now that I think about it, but I did not realize they were indicative of a hard drive problem at the time. For some months, windows would on rare occasions crash, and upon reboot, would get stuck on the 'starting windows' screen, but if I waited long enough, it would get passed this and start up just fine. If ran in safe mode during these rare occasions, my computer would get stuck on the line CLASSPNP.sys. I wasn't sure, and still am not sure what any of that means. Lastly, something in my computer (which I assume was the hard drive) started making a humming noise. I thought it was the fan at first, but that wasn't the case. I ignored it-not realizing that strange noises are one of the telltale signs of a hard drive in its death throes. None of the data on these are terribly important, mostly computer games and photos that are backed up on other computers.

So, my question is, how can I tell which (if not both) of my hard drives are not functioning properly? And if I identify the faulty drive, would it be possible for me to transfer data from it to the external drive as I had originally intended? Please do bear with me, as I am not too tech savvy, I had a lot of help building this computer 4 years ago. As you may have guessed, I am kind of an idiot about this stuff.

Here is some information about my system:
HDD: Western Digital Caviar Blue SATA WD5000AAKX
Motherboard: Fatal1ty Z77 Professional M
CPU: Intel I-3
Graphics: AMD Radeon Sapphire HD 7500 series
Power Supply: ocz700mxsp
OS: Windows 7

Start by obtaining a SMART report from each drive.

http://crystalmark.info/software/Crysta ... dex-e.html

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

I take it that in order to do that I would need to hook up my drive to a separate working computer?

Yes that would be one way, or you stick them in a USB enclosure. A SATA connection would be better, though.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Okay, so if I understand correctly, I could get a USB enclosure, transfer data from my hard drives into it and then move that data to my external hard drive? Will a USB enclosure work by itself or does it also require a working computer to operate?

I'm talking about an empty enclosure. Install your suspect drive in this enclosure, connect it to a working computer's USB port, and then examine its SMART report. Or boot from a Ubuntu Live CD and run smartctl.

That said, it would be far better to connect via SATA in a working computer.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

I'll see what I can do. The only other computer in my household (aside from a laptop) is super outdated, enough so that it probably doesn't have USB. So with an enclosure, and a computer that has USB, I could hook up my suspect drive to this computer, run SMART, and find out if it has anything wrong with it? Thanks a ton for your timely replies!

So for instance, I could use something like this?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00HJZJI8 ... ref=plSrch

It is a USB 3.0 to 2.5" SATA adapter.
Your drive is 3.5", so you should go for something like this.

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Those who know don’t talk. Those who talk don’t know.

Hi ,
Why Not Give it To a Guy Who is Not And Pay Him Some Money For This Like This Your Data Would Be Safe IMHO Without Experiementation .Otherwise Here On HDDGuru You Will Keep On Going Round And Round Because Some Of Then Are Very Knowledgeable Veteran DR/Non DR Guys

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Regards
Amarbir S Dhillon , Chandigarh Data Recovery Labs [India]
Logical,Semi Physical And Physical Data Recovery
Website-> http://www.chandigarhdatarecovery.com

Because that would probably be more money than I'd be willing to invest for data I don't care enough about.