• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

S.M.A.R.T. Hard Drive errors. Reliable?

C

Cadaver

Senior member
My Motherboard BIOS and Norton Util 2002 are reporting to me that my Western Digital 40GB (can't remember model #) WinXP Pro boot drive is indicating a SMART physical disk error. It's telling me to back up my data and replace the drive.

Are these errors reliable? Is the drive looking at impending death? Should I really replace it? Disk Doctor reports no errors at this time.

On top of that, these errors began a few hours after updating the BIOS on my Gigabyte 7VRXP motherboard (from f4 to f11). Although I did have SMART enabled with the original BIOS as well (and no errors reported), could the new BIOS be the cause of the errors? My slave drive is not reporting these errors (a WD 20GB data drive).
 
If SMART is telling you there is an error, it REALLY is time to back up.
 
Lots of posts about S.M.A.R.T. error reliability recently.

Back up. Now. It might not fail today, or tomorrow, or next week...but it's on its way to failure.
 
OK, this is getting weird.
In the process of checking the hard drives with Disk Doctor, etc., the computer has been rebooted several times.
Neither the BIOS nor Norton is displaying a SMART error any longer.
Should I still replace the drive, or could it have been a fluke?

And to go off topic briefly, if I backup the whole drive with the built-in utility in WinXP, could I restore it to a new drive and expect it to be bootable?
 
spend $6 in shipping for an advance exchange (I think WD does it, maxtor does) and ghost your data over

or pretend nothing is wrong and lose your data
 
Over the past several years, I've found SMART to be relatively innaccurate as well, but then I don't really care, 'cuz I backup my data once a week whether it needs to be or not. 😉 And yes, I do restores as well to make sure my backups are really doing what they're supposed to.

I've seen too many businesses with servers that kept using backup tapes but never bothered to actually CHECK and see if the backups were reliable or not on a restore.
rolleye.gif

 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top