What is S.M.A.R.T. (Asus A8N problem)

[ahurtt]

Decided to start a new thread for this question:

Well, now dig my latest problem. I got home tonight, booted up, it went into XP and I started going about configuring my settings and stuff and the system slowly froze and locked up as I was trying to access Control Panel. I hit the reset and after POST, right when it should have started loading the OS, the screen went black (but power light was still green). So I unplugged the monitor from the back of the video card and reinserted and the video came back on. All that was there was a message saying something about a windows system file being corrupt or missing. So I turned off the power and totally unplugged the PSU. Then I powered back on and looked in the BIOS for anything amiss. I decided to enable SMART. It booted fine. I went back in BIOS and disabled SMART, problem came back. . .WTF!!?? Anybody else had this happen? Is this maybe an issue others have had when using the nVidia drivers instead of the generic Windows ones?

Asus A8N SLI Deluxe (BIOS rev. 1002)
Maxtor DiamondMax 10 SATA 250 Gig w/ NCQ (disabled) / 16 MB cache
2 x BFG 6600GT OC PCI express (66.93 drivers)
Athlon 64 3200+ (Winchester)
2 x 512 Corsair PC 3200

 

[Tweakin]

SMART is a fuzzy logic control that tries to determine if your hard drive is about to fail. It can then redirect information to a clean sector if one is available, or allow you to backup data before a total failure...which is what I think you are running into.

I would try another drive and see what happens.

 

[ahurtt]

D'oh! That sucks, this drive and whole system for that matter are brand new. I didn't drop it or bang it or anything (maybe the Fedex guy did I dunno). I don't have any other drive. But it seems to be working now even when I turned SMART back off. So maybe Smart repaired it temporarily at least. . .man I hope this isn't a shoddy drive. I wonder if it also could have something to do with large drive support in Windows XP? I have an original xp cd - pre any service packs - and I now know that it won't recognize anything over 127 gigs. I partitioned the drive using MaxBlast 3 (250 gig drive) into a 16 Gig "C" partition and the rest in a second "D" partition. Then I installed XP on the small partition, installed SP 2, and then ran Maxtor's Big Drive registry fix. Now xp sees the correct sizes for both the C partition and the D partition but I wonder if it has anything to do with that. . .

 

[Peter]

The actual SMART functionality is in the drives itself, monitoring operating parameters and keeping status of whether they're within sane thresholds. It's made to predict imminent drive failure BEFORE data loss occurs.

System BIOS "SMART" feature merely inquires the drive's status once during POST, and tells the user "OK" or "bad, backup now and replace drive". The drive's behavior does not change, whether you enable this or don't. Also, SMART does not make anyone repair anything, neither the drive nor the board.

 

[ahurtt]

Thanks for that info Peter. Once I got the system to boot to windows last night it ran fine except for some crashes which I was able to trace to nVidia drivers. . .sure hope they come out with some better nForce 4 specific unified drivers soon over at nVidia. This morning I booted it up and had SMART turned off and on the first boot, right after POST when windows should've started to load, I swear I ever so briefly saw a BSOD before the machine rebooted again. On the reboot it came up ok. I am really suspecting shoddy drivers. I looked in the Windows and System32 directories but I didn't find any minidump.