Can a Hard Drive fail when not plugged in?

Can a Hard Drive fail when not plugged in? Because I have my computer at my brothers and its getting this message:

Pri Master Hard Disk: S.M.A.R.T Status Bad, Backup and Replace.

I continue...

A Disk Read Error Occurred

I continue and it goes back to the one above, I drove my computer is my brothers house to be fixed. I wanted to know If I can still back up some files if I plug it into another computer, and will the Hard Drive Fail if he doesnt have enough time to look at it..Its not plugged in.

We already told you, your hard-drive is broken beyond (cheap/affordable) repair, get your data backed up properly.

Meaning: Don't boot from the disk, use another OS installation to backup the files.

W3bbo wrote:

We already told you, your hard-drive is broken beyond (cheap/affordable) repair, get your data backed up properly.

Meaning: Don't boot from the disk, use another OS installation to backup the files.

Thats what I ment, My brother may not have enough time to work on it yet, I was wondering if it would fail completely when its not plugged in or not turned on in awhile because hes been too busy to work on it. And If I could still back the files up.....

misterviet wrote:



Can a Hard Drive fail when not plugged in? Because I have my computer at my brothers and its getting this message:

Pri Master Hard Disk: S.M.A.R.T Status Bad, Backup and Replace.

I continue...

A Disk Read Error Occurred

I continue and it goes back to the one above, I drove my computer is my brothers house to be fixed. I wanted to know If I can still back up some files if I plug it into another computer, and will the Hard Drive Fail if he doesnt have enough time to look at it..Its not plugged in.

if by hard drive you mean "tower" no if you mean hard drive no
unless it was dead or damaged already

you SHOULD NOT remove the hard drive unless you know what you are doing and have an antistatic wrist strap to prevent (ESD)

misterviet wrote:



Can a Hard Drive fail when not plugged in? Because I have my computer at my brothers and its getting this message:

Pri Master Hard Disk: S.M.A.R.T Status Bad, Backup and Replace.

I continue...

A Disk Read Error Occurred

I continue and it goes back to the one above, I drove my computer is my brothers house to be fixed. I wanted to know If I can still back up some files if I plug it into another computer, and will the Hard Drive Fail if he doesnt have enough time to look at it..Its not plugged in.

Sure it can fail...if you hit it with a hammer, a car, or anything else and then plug it back in sure.... SMART isn't that some type of old legacy Norton Backup crap or something? I can imagine if the BIOS battery went dead, and it was trying to verify the timing or something MAYBE something could happen....

Whatever...don't be so cheap, you can always use this