SMART failure

[BeauJangles]

So my secondary drive in my laptop now generates SMART errors badly enough to warrant the "Your drive is about to critically fail... press f1 to continue" message. The problem is that pressing F1 does nothing, my computer just hangs at that screen forever. I tried disabling SMART detection in the BIOS (HP laptop), but there isn't a way to do it. I don't have another computer to plug the drive into right now either.

Any advice? I just want to grab a few things off the drive, then it can go blow up for all I care.

 

[RebateMonger]

Sounds like it's already gone. SMART didn't give any warnings until the drive had already failed?

You can try a USB-to-IDE/SATA adapter on the drive. Those are available for about $20. Remove the bad drive, boot the laptop, attach the bad drive to the adapter, and plug it into the USB port on the laptop. If the drive is recognized, you can try one of the many data recovery programs.

Your chances of recovery might be a bit better if you could directly connect it to some other PCs.

If you can't get the drive to be recognized, there are many data recovery companies out there.

After you are done, consider implementing one of the many data backup options now available so this can't happen again.

 

[BeauJangles]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
Sounds like it's already gone. SMART didn't give any warnings until the drive had already failed?

You can try a USB-to-IDE/SATA adapter on the drive. Those are available for about $20. Remove the bad drive, boot the laptop, attach the bad drive to the adapter, and plug it into the USB port on the laptop. If the drive is recognized, you can try one of the many data recovery programs.

Your chances of recovery might be a bit better if you could directly connect it to some other PCs.

If you can't get the drive to be recognized, there are many data recovery companies out there.

After you are done, consider implementing one of the many data backup options now available so this can't happen again.

Well, I've had a solid backup system for a while now, but, ironically, that computer's motherboard is fried. So I don't have a backup from the last six weeks or so... that's nothing critical, but it's still annoying.

As for the SMART failure, I had zero warnings beforehand. I put the computer into hibernate a few days ago and tried to turn it on the this morning. That's when I received the SMART failure message.

I've had SMART failures before on other drives and I've always either been able to get through the warning by pressing F1 or by disabling detection -- neither of which seems to work! Arg.

Edit: This drive is also not the boot drive, so I don't understand why I cannot get past this stupid warning message. When I take the drive out completely, the computer boots normally.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: BeauJangles
Well, I've had a solid backup system for a while now, but, ironically, that computer's motherboard is fried. So I don't have a backup from the last six weeks or so...

I'm paranoid about keeping backup systems running, because my experience is that as soon as they fail, that's when you need them.

 

[BeauJangles]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger

Originally posted by: BeauJangles
Well, I've had a solid backup system for a while now, but, ironically, that computer's motherboard is fried. So I don't have a backup from the last six weeks or so...

I'm paranoid about keeping backup systems running, because my experience is that as soon as they fail, that's when you need them.

Lesson learned

New question -- I hooked the drive up to an older machine we have in the house (abit ic7 mobo). The computer works fine, but as soon as I hook up ANY SATA drive (the failing one or otherwise), the computer gets to the windows loading screen and immediately reboots. Any ideas on that front?

edit: Seems as though the Abit board doesn't handle SATA drives very well. I set the drive to slave manually and I have no more rebooting problems. In fact, I'm backing up everything as we speak!

SUCCESS!

 

[Elixer]

The reboots is windows way of not showing you a BSOD.

For SMART, I find that in only very rare cases will it actually do what it was meant to do. It is too bad SMART isn't more reliable for detecting when a HD will go south.