S.M.A.R.T.status BAD, backup and replace

[Sandy]

Keep getting the error message"Pri master Hard disk: SMART status BAD,
backup and replace " on the BIOS page when i boot up my laptop. Does this
mean the disk is damaged? It freezes during check disk and won't even
format!

Any suggestions?

 

[Carey Frisch [MVP]]

Download the latest diagnostic software and utilities from the manufacturer of your hard drive.

Hard Drive Diagnostics Tools and Utilities
http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows XP - Shell/User
Microsoft Newsgroups

Be Smart! Protect Your PC!
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/protect/default.mspx

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:

| Keep getting the error message"Pri master Hard disk: SMART status BAD,
| backup and replace " on the BIOS page when i boot up my laptop. Does this
| mean the disk is damaged? It freezes during check disk and won't even
| format!
|
| Any suggestions?

 

[Guest]

It may be. SMART is a BIOS utility which let you know when the hdd is
defective.

 

[philo]

Keep getting the error message"Pri master Hard disk: SMART status BAD,
backup and replace " on the BIOS page when i boot up my laptop. Does this
mean the disk is damaged? It freezes during check disk and won't even
format!

Any suggestions?

the drive is bad, yes

 

[Ron Martell]

Keep getting the error message"Pri master Hard disk: SMART status BAD,
backup and replace " on the BIOS page when i boot up my laptop. Does this
mean the disk is damaged? It freezes during check disk and won't even
format!

Any suggestions?

Run, do not walk, to the nearest computer supply store and get a new
hard drive.

Your drive is about to die. If you procrastinate you risk losing any
chance of recovering your data from the drive, and you will still have
to replace it.


Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much."

 

[Al Dykes]

Run, do not walk, to the nearest computer supply store and get a new
hard drive.

Your drive is about to die. If you procrastinate you risk losing any
chance of recovering your data from the drive, and you will still have
to replace it.


Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much."

Assuming you don't have a backup, you should use the disk as little as
possible. Don't boot the system, etc.

I'd remove the disk and find a friend with an XP system. Plug the disk
in as a secondary and try to do an image copy of your disk to his C
drive or at least copy your data files and burn them into CDs. You
can d/l an eval copy of bootitNG or acronis to do the image
operation. When you get the new disk you can re0image it on his
machine.

A local small computer store will do this for you for a few bucks and
sell you a new disk, too.

 

[NobodyMan]

Run, do not walk, to the nearest computer supply store and get a new
hard drive.

Your drive is about to die. If you procrastinate you risk losing any
chance of recovering your data from the drive, and you will still have
to replace it.


Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada

Although this **may** be true, that does not mean it IS true.

My father's brand new hard drive reported this the first time we fired
up the new computer. We went it BIOS and turned off the SMART
function, and then ran the drive for a while to see what would happen.

You know what? He still has this drive, 100 percent functional, five
years later. He uses it to store some data on. If he turns SMART
back on, he gets the message indicating that failure is imminent.

Baugh!

 

[Ron Martell]

Although this **may** be true, that does not mean it IS true.

My father's brand new hard drive reported this the first time we fired
up the new computer. We went it BIOS and turned off the SMART
function, and then ran the drive for a while to see what would happen.

You know what? He still has this drive, 100 percent functional, five
years later. He uses it to store some data on. If he turns SMART
back on, he gets the message indicating that failure is imminent.

Baugh!

For every instance such as your father's drive there are at least
10,000 others where the S.M.A.R.T. warning was correct.


Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much."

 

[NobodyMan]

For every instance such as your father's drive there are at least
10,000 others where the S.M.A.R.T. warning was correct.


Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada

For every instance where somebody said it was incorrect, there are at
least thousands more who have the same experience but never reported
it.

Statistics can be so meaningless sometimes.

 

[cquirke (MVP Windows shell/user)]

That's interesting. Even allowing for the hiding of defects, 5 years
is a long time to be lucky with a failing hard drive

I usually see the reverse; drives that SMART says are OK, but that
have failing sectors and slowdowns due to sector retries.

Several technologies aim to sweep bad sectors under the rug - in fact,
SMART may have been a response to consumer anger about this:
- hard drive's firmware swaps sick to good sectors on the fly
- NTFS driver code swaps sick to good clusters on the fly
- ChkDsk /F and AutoChk equivalent swaps sick to good clusters

Of these, only the last has some visibility; the other two processes
are in the background and don't report what they do. In particular,
bad sectors managed by the hard drive's firmware will not show up as
bad in the map that the OS maintains for the file system.

So while disk diagnostics will (or should) tell you whether sectors
currently in the firmware's address space are readable or not, they
can't tell you about bad sectors that have been swapped out of this
address space by the hard drive's firmware. The only record of that
would be the statistics that SMART can report - if you find a SMART
reporting tool that shows you this raw data.

---------------- ----- ---- --- -- - - - -

Cats have 9 lives, which makes them
ideal for experimentation!

 

[Ron Martell]

For every instance where somebody said it was incorrect, there are at
least thousands more who have the same experience but never reported
it.

Statistics can be so meaningless sometimes.

I have been repairing and servicing computers for the past 14 years,
well before the advent of the S.M.A.R.T. technology.

I have never encountered a single instance of anyone who has safely
ignored a S.M.A.R.T. failure warning for an extended period of time,
and have never read of any such instance other than your report.

I have, however, encountered many instances of totally dead hard
drives where the owners had either ignored the S.M.A.R.T. warnings or
had actually disabled S.M.A.R.T. in the BIOS setup so as to get rid of
them. I have one such machine in my shop at the moment, which I am
endeavoring to recover some critical files off of, without success so
far. The owner may be forced to make a decision to either forego any
recovery or spend a large sum of money to send the drive to a "clean
room" data recovery specialist. They had been ignoring the S.M.A.R.T.
warning for about 3 weeks and then one day the computer would no
longer boot.


Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much."

 

[Rattleon]

For Ron: I have been repairing and building PC's for 32 years and I have
seen several S.M.A.R.T. warnings that have been false. Once in a Great While
it does inform of pending failure, but rarely! Most Hard drive fail without
warning with "COD" (click of death).