s.m.a.r.t. says critical, but SpinRite and HDAT2 say no errors

[thebeyonder]

I have a hard drive (IDE) that s.m.a.r.t. says health is critical, too many relocated sectors, and BIOS says the same thing and press F1 to continue booting up.

I zeroed the hard drive and that didn't do anything.

then I ran SpinRite level 5 (detect and repair) and it found no errors at all.

then I ran HDAT2 "detect bad sectors", it found 0 errors. so I ran the "powerful test READ/WRITE/READ/COMPARE" (which is more or less the same thing as SpinRite level 5) and it also found 0 errors on the whole hard drive.

still any s.m.a.r.t. data program tells me it has critical health because of relocated sectors and BIOS makes me press F1 to remind me that s.m.a.r.t. is critical.

I know that s.m.a.r.t. tells me what has happened in the past, sectors were relocated, but there are NO errors on the disk surface right now.

what do I do? reset s.m.a.r.t. data, or throw it away?

and how do you reset s.m.a.r.t. anyway?

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Get your data of that drive at once...!!!

SMART isn't just for monitoring bad sectors, but also things like the harddrives motor, electronics etc.

 

[thebeyonder]

the hard drive has been zeroed. there is no data on the hard drive, not even a blank partition.

 

[WilliamM2]

Have you tried running the manufacturers diagnostic on it? I find them to be the most reliable.

If sectors have been re-mapped, they won't be read or written to, so that type of test isn't going to show anything, unless new bad sectors appear during the test.

 

[thebeyonder]

that would explain a lot. no I haven't run the manufacturer's diagnostics. I am running the drive's self-test in HDAT2 and it seems to be hanging at 60%.

I think I'm just going to trash it.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

I think I'm just going to trash it.

What model and how old is the drive? I don't mean just age but how many hours has it been powered on and how many load/unload cycles?

Any chance of an RMA...?

In my experience if a drive hasn't failed in the first 6 months it has a good chance of a long life.

 

[nightspydk]

Personally I would not trust smart ever. Give an excample. If a write continously fails smart will report the drive is failing, but there might be other issues to take into account, something as ridiculous as drive space remaining. Many other issues with smart.

Smart is highly inaccurate and google agrees not just me.

That is my personal opinion.

I had a seagate drive run for years (really) where smart reported it dead from the start. With my setup smart is disabled i bios.

 

[PliotronX]

If interpreted correctly, it is a great tool for looking at the health of the drive. A quick chkdsk and CrystalDiskInfo run are how I have been able to determine the HDD as the culprit for clients' failing drives. Its own prediction of failure is only 70% accurate. I have never personally seen a case where a drive's SMART reported reallocated sectors when there were not. If it really doesn't look like the drive has issues (have you benchmarked to see if the numbers are similar to when it was new?) I would just disable the BIOS check and perhaps Windows check because that popup can be annoying but monitor it from time to time.

 

[HeXen]

the hard drive has been zeroed. there is no data on the hard drive, not even a blank partition.

If you can't afford to replace it, I wouldn't trust it with anything more than backup of a backup data or just games installs, videos or other data you can put onto a new drive if it does end up failing.

I have been through 2 enterprise level drives and a couple other regular ones and it's no joke when it fails, it's a PITA unless it's an image or something easily transferred over from another medium so I don't jack around with different apps like I'm looking for a second opinion which may be wrong too, I just replace them.

 

[code65536]

When you get a checkup, the doctor will ask you if you've been having problems and do some tests, because some problems a person can feel but won't show up in tests, and some problems will show up in tests but the person can't feel it.

This applies to storage: looking at SMART is asking the drive how it feels--it can reveal problems that tests can't, but it doesn't report some problems that can only be found by testing.

tl;dr: SMART reporting and testing are not substitutes for each other, but are complementary. You need to do both.

 

[PliotronX]

When you get a checkup, the doctor will ask you if you've been having problems and do some tests, because some problems a person can feel but won't show up in tests, and some problems will show up in tests but the person can't feel it.

This applies to storage: looking at SMART is asking the drive how it feels--it can reveal problems that tests can't, but it doesn't report some problems that can only be found by testing.

tl;dr: SMART reporting and testing are not substitutes for each other, but are complementary. You need to do both.

Well put, I'm always surprised at how many are uninformed of SMART and discredit it because it's "just that annoying error" when they think malware is causing it. It is reading parameters that the OS and even the BIOS are not set to give specifics for. No replacement for human interpretation. When I learned how to use it to my advantage many moons ago it became an invaluable tool in the troubleshooting box.