mhaase-at-springmind.com said:
This isn't meant as a slam, but if you really "want to fix it", why
don't you do what it's trying to tell you to do and replace the drive?
By turning off the warning, you're pretty much just masking the
problem. Like turning up the stereo so you don't hear the failing CPU
fan.
As someone who has worked as a qualified computer technician I can say that
NOT all S.M.A.R.T. warnings mean a drive is about to fail. As an example my
employer had a batch of approx 30 PCs with identical hardware during my
stay. About 6 or 7 of these had the S.M.A.R.T. flag tripped and popped up a
warning on boot if detection was enabled in the BIOS yet formatting worked
perfectly well with no bad sectors discovered. During the 15 or so months I
was with the organisation, none of the drives with tripped S.M.A.R.T. flags
went on to fail. All of the valuable data created by users was stored on a
server with a RAID 5 configuration, we also had spare drives in the cupboard
and used imaging software so we could afford to "wait and see" what would
happen.
The S.M.A.R.T flag can be tripped by a multitude of reasons including things
like power surges or even disconnecting IDE ribbon cables from the drive
while it's still powered on (with some drives at least). If the OP has
thoroughly backed up all valuable data, I would suggest a low level erasure
of the whole drive is performed using Maxtor's utility for the model of
drive (powermax?) and note if any bad sectors are detected - if none are
found reinstall from scratch and as long as regular backups are performed
keep using it. If bad sectors are found, run the utility again a while later
(after reinstalling and backing up regularly as above) and see if more are
found - if so, the drive is likely on the way out. I'd also contact Maxtor
to see what could be done to resolve it, depending on the age of the drive -
if its just out of warranty they may still replace it.
If the OP has another machine with a different motherboard that this drive
can be used in, I'd suggest a swap and disable S.M.A.R.T. on that machine.
Also a BIOS upgrade to the LATEST (not necessarily just a newer) version may
fix the issue of S.M.A.R.T. detection not being turned off. The mobo maker
could then be contacted for advise if this didn't work.
Paul