hard disk drive issues when smart enabled

[trickytwista]

hi guys, recently going through a pile of laptop hard drives, on some when "smart" is enabled in the bios i get an arror message on boot up... message says "hdd bad, backup and replace, press F1 to continue"... however when i press f1 and continue the drive lets me fdisk it and scan it for bad sectors but theres no bad sectors on it.. anyone any idea of what causes this? or maybe a possible idea how to fix it?... BTW if i disable "smart" in bios setup i obviosly dont get this message and the drive is usable without interruptions... also on some other drives i get a message immediately saying "primary master disk drive error, press f1 to resume"... any thought or ideas are welcomed, thanks guys twista

Edited February 2, 2006 by trickytwista

[LLXX]

There is a SMART utility (I can't remember the name of it...) that lets you view more detailed information about the drive. The drive might not have failed yet, but has been detected to be very soon.

[miko]

EVEREST (from http://www.lavalys.com ) gives some good SMART info but the free version has been discontinued, you should still be able to find it pretty easy on the web though.

it'll should tell show you what SMART info the drive is supplying, which might help your diagnosis

i think the latest version is 2.20 but 2.01 works better for me (but that could be because i'm on 98SE) both are about 4MB zipped btw.

generally, it's a good peice of diagnostic software to have around and it doesn't have the required dependances of Sisoft Sandra.

Edited February 3, 2006 by miko

[trickytwista]

thanks guys, i shall check it out

[trickytwista]

it appears that everest works from within windows.... i really need a tool or something that can work from dos as theres no OS on the drives.. thanks

[trickytwista]

c'mon guys we slacking on this one, lol

[ripken204]

what if the drive doesnt support smart?

[puntoMX]

Then it will not give you the message "bad drive", some BIOSes don’t give you any message, but it’s easy to see if you disable it and you get the message "SMART capable but disabled".

SMART is not so precise when it comes to errors, lets say that it just gets a variable back from the drive that needs to be in-between 2 values. If it’s out of that range it gives you the "bad disk" error. Some times the drive had read write hit errors, calibration errors or RPM errors, but most of the time it’s lose alarm . For more info Google a bit, it too much to explain here, but you have an idea...

[trickytwista]

any more thoughts or ideas about this guys? this **** smart issue is real annoying

[nmX.Memnoch]

Is this a bunch of drives you're trying in one laptop or are you experiencing the issue on multiple laptops?

[trickytwista]

no, they are all laptop drives and im using an adaptor so i can test them on a desktop pc, smart says some of them are ok and some says backup and replace