Hard drives , and more mechanical ones, are prone to failure, so if when you turn on the PC you run into the error Hard Disk 1 Quick (303), Hard Disk 1 Full (305) or even Hard Disk 1 SMART ( 301) , we will tell you what you can do about it, at least to be able to safeguard the data you have on the hard drive because as you might suppose, they are quite critical errors on the hard drive.
Before starting, you must be aware that if you have reached the point where you have received any of these errors, you run a great risk that the data on the disk will be lost forever, since these errors are indicative that something bad happens to the hard disk since the POST has not been able to initialize it. The first recommendation, of course, is that you go buying a new unit, but let’s see what can be done about it.
Quick 303 and Full 305 error on hard disk, why do they appear?
These errors can appear when the computer starts up during POST, at which point the computer checks the hardware. They are specific errors of the hard disk and more specifically of a mechanical hard disk ( they do not appear in SSD ) that indicate that it is beginning to fail or that it has passed away and that you need to replace it. The ideal is precisely to replace the disk that fails with a new one, but there are some things you can do to try to repair the disk and that can sometimes help you to safeguard the data you have on it.
There are times when these errors can also appear when running diagnostic tools, such as the BIOS itself.
Similarly, hard drive errors 305, 303, and 301 can even appear in third-party software tools that check the integrity of a hard drive; The fact is that wherever some of these errors have appeared you should prepare because they are quite serious, and from now on we tell you that if you manage to solve them you should feel very lucky.
What should you do if you receive any of these errors?
The first thing you should do is, as we have mentioned before, not take risks and buy a new hard disk drive to replace the one that is causing problems, even though, as we are going to tell you below, there are still possibilities of being able to “save” the device, despite the fact that you manage to fix it, there is a good chance that you will suffer the error again sooner or later because that hard disk drive does not work well.
That being said, there are a few ways to fix these Quick 303 and Full 305 errors, but whether they work or not will depend on the actual condition of the drive because there are times when it has completely died and the damage is irreversible. Let’s see it.
The recovery drive is the key
Normally, despite the fact that you receive these errors, the PC can continue to boot, although it is true that you may have several blue screens (BSOD) and that the system works very, very slow. In any case, you can also go to another PC (like a family or friend for example), and connect the hard drive that is giving you problems to do so.
The first thing you should do is create a recovery drive, for which you will also need a USB pen drive or external hard drive of at least 16 GB capacity. Click on the Start button in Windows and type “Recovery drive” to access the tool, and on the first screen make sure that the option to make a backup copy of the system files in the recovery drive is checked.
Click on next and wait a few seconds (or minutes, depending on the performance of the disk) for the application to collect the necessary information from the system. In the next step you must connect the USB storage drive and select it (keep in mind that all its content will be erased by doing this, and in fact a warning message will appear after selecting the drive and clicking Next).
In the next step, click on Create and wait for the automatic process to take care of everything.
Once finished, reboot the system and boot from the recovery disc you just created. Select Advanced Options and Command Prompt, from where you must execute the following command:
chkdsk / f / r
This will thoroughly examine the health of the hard drive and fix any problems that it is capable of.
In the meantime, as we have recommended before you should replace the hard drive that is failing, and to recover the system to how you had it before we have created the recovery disc (in addition to running CHKDSK in the previous step), so it is time to reboot again and reboot the system from the USB drive that we created earlier.
On this occasion, you will have to choose in the menu the option Diagnostics / Advanced Settings / Recovery of the system image, and simply continue the process following the instructions of the wizard (basically, it is to click Next all the time with the default options). The rest will be done by the entire recovery program automatically.
Once this is done and if everything has gone well, you will have your system as you had it in terms of documents, files and settings, but you must bear in mind that the programs and games that you have installed will have to be reinstalled again , since these are not transferred during the creation of the system image disk, only the settings and documents (otherwise, you would need a fairly large unit and also whose size would depend on the number of programs and others that you have installed).
In short, in this article we have told you how to safeguard and restore your files and settings when the disk drive is failing with Quick 303 and Full 305 errors, but the summary of all this is that that hard disk is dead or about to die and you will have to replace it with a new one irremediably.