Update SMART Error

[Geoff]

The bios was reporting a smart imminent drive failure message on bootup.
However, when I downloaded utilities from western digital and seagate, the
smart status was normal and the extended tests came back normal.

Someone mentioned bios rot but actually, I think it was cmos rot. While
working on my MB, I replaced the battery. I removed it for about an hour,
put the new one in, got a checksum error on bootup and 'loading defaults'
message and so far, have not had the smart error message.

-g

 

[P2B]

The bios was reporting a smart imminent drive failure message on bootup.
However, when I downloaded utilities from western digital and seagate, the
smart status was normal and the extended tests came back normal.

Someone mentioned bios rot but actually, I think it was cmos rot. While
working on my MB, I replaced the battery. I removed it for about an hour,
put the new one in, got a checksum error on bootup and 'loading defaults'
message and so far, have not had the smart error message.

Thanks for posting the resolution.

BTW, I originally suggested clearing CMOS first, and reflashing the BIOS
only if the problem persisted.

P2B

 

[P2B]

No luck with resetting the rtc/nvram. The "Exceeded Failure Prediction
Threshold" message remains. With the questionable drive removed from
the Adaptec BIOS scan, the message goes away, so it looks like a
problem with this particular Seagate disk - but not a SMART one.

Very odd. What model is the Seagate?

All I want to do is kill the message because it halts the boot.

Setting the BIOS to Halt On No Errors doesn't accomplish that?

P2B

 

[Robert Hancock]

Setting the BIOS to Halt On No Errors doesn't accomplish that?

If the Adaptec SCSI BIOS is doing it, it won't, since the system BIOS
does not control that bootup sequence.

 

[P2B]

The drive is a 'SEAGATE ST118273LW'.

None of the (1014b3) BIOS settings affect the message for the reason
Robert gave. Only excluding the disk from the BIOS scan 'works'.

There are two reasons I suspect the SMART error message comes from the
motherboard BIOS rather than the Adaptec BIOS:

1. The OP reported the error for a WD IDE drive. If I understood him
correctly, the error persisted when no SCSI devices were attached.

2. You reported the error as the last BIOS message displayed, just
before the first OS loader message. The motherboard BIOS is back in
control at that point, having displayed the system configuration summary
page followed by any ESCD messages. The last message from the Adaptec
BIOS is the SCSI BIOS status, i.e. installed or not installed.

In any case the root cause appears to be buggy SMART failure detection,
and may not be fixable since turning off SMART (the default, BTW) and/or
halt on errors in the BIOS doesn't appear to have any effect.

The OP did say he set "halt on all errors except disk and keyboard"
rather than "halt on no errors", which might be a straw worth grasping...

P2B

 

[Geoff]

The drive is a 'SEAGATE ST118273LW'.

You need to go to the seagate web page and confirm the smart error using
their tools. If there is no problem then I would say it is buggy smart
error detection on the part of the adaptec bios. On my machine, the bios
would look for the ide drives, I have one cd-rom and one 80 gig hard disk,
and right after finding them, the smart error would appear. The nice thing
about the wdc disk tools is it shows the threshold values and the worst
value that ever occurred. In my case, all the values were well within the
normal ranges.

-g