SMART failure

[Lewis]

The last two times I've booted my machine I've been told there was a
SMART failure on one of the disk and to backup.
It is the boot disk (of course) and I have backed-up, though there is
very little on taht drive I care about.

The thing is, I only seem to hear about this at boot, there's nothing
once windows is up that tell me anything at all. Looking in disk
Management, there no mention of SMART and when looking at the properties
of the disk there's no indication there is an error or waht it might be.

Drive is quite new, so I'd like to know. I suppose I need to find the
drive's manufacturer (ST is Seagate, as I recall) and run their
utilities?

 

[Char Jackson]

The last two times I've booted my machine I've been told there was a
SMART failure on one of the disk and to backup.
It is the boot disk (of course) and I have backed-up, though there is
very little on taht drive I care about.

The thing is, I only seem to hear about this at boot, there's nothing
once windows is up that tell me anything at all. Looking in disk
Management, there no mention of SMART and when looking at the properties
of the disk there's no indication there is an error or waht it might be.

Drive is quite new, so I'd like to know. I suppose I need to find the
drive's manufacturer (ST is Seagate, as I recall) and run their
utilities?

Four tools that I recommend:
1. The manufacturer's utilities.
2. HD Tune <http://www.hdtune.com/>
3. Hard Disk Sentinel <http://www.hdsentinel.com/index.php>
4. Disk Checkup <http://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm>

I've used all of these successfully at one time or another.

Numbers 1 and 4 are free, while 2 and 3 have free trials. Numbers 2,
3, and 4 will identify the drive so that you can be sure you're going
to the correct manufacturer's website.

 

[Paul]

The last two times I've booted my machine I've been told there was a
SMART failure on one of the disk and to backup.
It is the boot disk (of course) and I have backed-up, though there is
very little on taht drive I care about.

The thing is, I only seem to hear about this at boot, there's nothing
once windows is up that tell me anything at all. Looking in disk
Management, there no mention of SMART and when looking at the properties
of the disk there's no indication there is an error or waht it might be.

Drive is quite new, so I'd like to know. I suppose I need to find the
drive's manufacturer (ST is Seagate, as I recall) and run their
utilities?

It could be, that the BIOS has a feature to check SMART during
Power On Self Test, and print the results of the check on the
screen. I think I've left mine enabled, because I'd like to be
alerted at the first sign of trouble. It saves having to manually
check later in Windows.

If you need a report while Windows is running, you can try
HDTune 2.55 (it's free). It has a tab with SMART on it. SMART won't show,
if the disk interface doesn't support SMART reporting. A directly
connected hard drive should be fine, and worth a check.

http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe

If you take a screen snapshot of your SMART results, and upload it to
a site like imageshack.us (or another picture hosting site), you can
post a link to the image and ask for someone on USENET to analyse it
for you.

I consider this one to be a reasonable single indicator. If it goes
non-zero, I start the process of shopping for another drive. If the
count was 100 or more, I'd make sure there was a backup immediately
(drop what you're doing, and backup). Don't even turn off the computer
until the backup is completed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

"Current Pending Sector Count

Count of "unstable" sectors (waiting to be remapped, because of read errors).
If an unstable sector is subsequently written or read successfully, this value
is decreased and the sector is not remapped. Read errors on a sector will not
remap the sector (since it might be readable later); instead, the drive firmware
remembers that the sector needs to be remapped, and remaps it the next time it's
written."

I lost one drive, because I was tired, and it was late at night when trouble
showed up. I figured I'd turn off the PC, and backup the disk the next day.
When I turned on the computer, the drive was gone... That's how I can offer
advice, such as "don't turn off the PC" etc :-(

HTH,
Paul

 

[Flint]

The last two times I've booted my machine I've been told there was a
SMART failure on one of the disk and to backup.
It is the boot disk (of course) and I have backed-up, though there is
very little on taht drive I care about.

The thing is, I only seem to hear about this at boot, there's nothing
once windows is up that tell me anything at all. Looking in disk
Management, there no mention of SMART and when looking at the properties
of the disk there's no indication there is an error or waht it might be.

Drive is quite new, so I'd like to know. I suppose I need to find the
drive's manufacturer (ST is Seagate, as I recall) and run their
utilities?

It's highly infrequent, but a new drive having SMART errors during
POST are not unheard of. The thing is, the SMART error reporting you
are getting is occurring before Windows boots, so more than likely
there is a log of errors being saved in CMOS, but it is also possible
Windows isn't reporting the error, but still logging it. You won't
find the error report log in 'properties' however. You might want to
check under Start/Administrative Tools/Event Viewer in order to check
the Windows logs for hardware errors on the drive.

While I have had drives with SMART errors that weren't truly SMART
errors, and were repairable/recoverable using Spinrite, the SMART
error reporting/logging during a POST operation is usually correct
more often than it is wrong. It's likely the drive will need replacing.

Go with a WD 'Black' drive anyway...

 

[Agent_C]

The last two times I've booted my machine I've been told there was a
SMART failure on one of the disk and to backup.

The drive is dying; back up your data and replace it.

A_C

 

[Bruce Chambers]

The last two times I've booted my machine I've been told there was a
SMART failure on one of the disk and to backup.
It is the boot disk (of course) and I have backed-up, though there is
very little on taht drive I care about.

The thing is, I only seem to hear about this at boot, there's nothing
once windows is up that tell me anything at all. Looking in disk
Management, there no mention of SMART and when looking at the properties
of the disk there's no indication there is an error or waht it might be.

Drive is quite new, so I'd like to know. I suppose I need to find the
drive's manufacturer (ST is Seagate, as I recall) and run their
utilities?

Even new hardware can fail. At the very least, use the drive
manufacturer's diagnostic utility to check it out.

For the background on S.M.A.R.T., start here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Monitoring,_Analysis,_and_Reporting_Technology

Having seen the same error, I can only say: "Back up your data
daily until you replace that drive."

On those machines I on which I've seen those S.M.A.R.T. warnings,
catastrophic hard drive failures invariably followed. Some hard drives
lasted for a few days after the warnings first appeared, one lasted
months, and some lasted only minutes. I suppose the one that lasted
months could be considered a false alarm, as months hardly translate to
"imminent," but, on the whole, I'd suggest you take the warnings seriously.




--

Bruce Chambers

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[Yousuf Khan]

The last two times I've booted my machine I've been told there was a
SMART failure on one of the disk and to backup.
It is the boot disk (of course) and I have backed-up, though there is
very little on taht drive I care about.

The thing is, I only seem to hear about this at boot, there's nothing
once windows is up that tell me anything at all. Looking in disk
Management, there no mention of SMART and when looking at the properties
of the disk there's no indication there is an error or waht it might be.

Drive is quite new, so I'd like to know. I suppose I need to find the
drive's manufacturer (ST is Seagate, as I recall) and run their
utilities?

In addition to the other suggestions about using such utilities as Hard
Disk Sentinel, etc., the reason that Windows itself doesn't warn you
about these SMART errors is because Windows' SMART monitoring features
are disabled by default when it ships. But you can enable it simply.

All you need to do is go into Control Panel, search for the Task
Scheduler. When you find it, click on the "Task Scheduler Library" to
open it up. Then go to the folder \Microsoft\Windows\DiskDiagnostic, and
click on the task named "Microsoft-Windows-DiskDiagnosticResolver".
You'll notice that its status is initially disabled, just enable it.

Unfortunately, the reason it might be disabled by default is that it
might be a very annoying warning, and it'll pester you about failing
disks for all of the most minor problems. Hard Disk Sentinel will much
more likely give you a better idea about how the serious the situation
really is or isn't.

Yousuf Khan