What to do if your hard drive may be failing?

Coming from someone who just lost two disks, don’t wait around to see if it survives. Back up everything you hold dear NOW, and stop using the disk. Don’t boot it, don’t write to it, don’t touch the **** thing.

, get a Linux bootable USB. Ubuntu Rescue or plain Ubuntu works very well. Using that, run a couple of disk checks such as badblocks, fsck and smartctl. If anything is in the red, either use it for things you can live without or as a high-tech coaster. If the disk checks out after thorough checking (it could conceivably take a few days, considering the size of your disk), reinstall your operating system.