Hard drive Failure

[Stripe]

Anyone tell me more information on this:

- 0510-AE: SMART Failure is predicted on IDE Device # 0
Warning- Immediately back up your data and replace your hard drive. A failure may be imminent.

Now I know that there's monitoring software, but is it built into the hard drive or in the bios?

Also, do all drives have this built into them (is it some sort of standard)? And what kind of failures do they detect?

[phishhead]

it just a warning telling you that your crap is about to be toast. did you run a chkdsk on the drive yet.

[Reverend]

A good explanation of SMART can be found here (http://www.pctechguide.com/04disk2.htm) (scroll down page)

[phishhead]

hey stripe go here (http://www.panterasoft.com/download.html)

and download HDD health and it will tell you whats going on with your drives.

[Stripe]

No need for the HDD health status. I can sum it up in one word...

DEAD!!! (as some may have noticed with my FTP down)...

I was just wondering about how they did the SMART monitoring and wanted to know if it is included in all drives or specific drives.

Thanks Reverend for the article...very good and informative.

[egghead]

smartdrive in the bios of your motherboard has been correct for me

when i started getting an error at boot about the drive i thought the drive was fine.
one day windows slowed to a crawl
i couldnt take any more so after a while of frustration i formated the thing using xp install disc

the thing was even slower so i quit and rebooted and my drive just started ticking.

sad sad story.

how big is your drive?

back up the drive and if its a maxtor get there utility disc to do a check. if it comes back faulty you will need to rma it if its still under warranty


egghead

[Dehcbad25]

Great Link Rev.
I had an idea about SMART but that link was concise and easy to understand, yet complete.
I am curious to know about Stripe and his drive

[Stripe]

Well...Sad story...brings tears to my eyes.

I had a Maxtor bigfoot (if anyone remembers, they are the 5"1/4 drives (yes, 5"1/4) that Maxtor made about 7~8 years ago Maxtor Bigfoot (http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/products/ata/legacy/bigfoot_ts/) )) Yes you read that right, a whopping 4000rpm :D.

Anyways, drive has server me faithfully for all these years. Well, lately, the computer would not want to wake from hibernate mode (well, who would). I would power it down and it would boot back up fine. Look in my admin alerts and no problems recorded. So I figured I (or my wife) made booboo and accidentally shut the computer down. Next thing that happened was a directory became unreadable. The error checking on the drive would not run both the "Auto fix errors" or the "Recover bad sectors" options simultaneously, but they could be run independently (I'm concerned here but not overly since neither check came up with problems). So finally, the other day, my computer would wake from hibernation the SECOND time in the day (first time that it happened twice in a day). After the second boot up I got the smart error.

And that's the end of the story...unless you guys want to hear about installing the new drive and configuring and blah blah blah....

So the drive is gone, I just thought the SMART warning was very interesting and wanted to learn more about it.

[Dehcbad25]

Actually is not so sad story. IF the drive is 7~8 years old, I think that you had squeeze akk that it had to give you.:D

[egghead]

I had a 40 gig drive and it lasted only month and a half!

i still have it and the warrenty is still good!

i am not sure why i dontsend it in but i heard if you send photograph through the mail they come back melted.


thats another story.


egghead

[Thor]

Something like this may help but be prepared for it to take a long time.

Dmitrity Primochenko

Filename: hddreg.exe, 1.86Mb
Type: Shareware, $38.75

Almost 60 % of all damaged by bad sectors hard drives have incorrectly magnetized disk surface. Our researches have been fruitful and we have found algorithm which is special sequence of high and low level signals. These signals are generated by the software and they switch damaged surface. Even low level formatting is not able to handle this task! HDD Regenerator regenerates bad sectors by magnetic reversal. If your hard drive is damaged by bad sectors, the disk not only becomes unfit for use, but also you risk to lose information stored on the disk. HDD Regenerator will regenerate your hard disk. As a result, not readable damaged information will be restored. With all this going on the existing information will not be affected!

[Dehcbad25]

Does this really works?
:confused:

[Thor]

I've heard good reports on it but haven't tested it myself. Anyone with a dead/maimed drive they want to try it on?

[Dehcbad25]

Humm, I have 3 or 4 bad drives around work, I will see if I make a time to test them, but it could take a month before any test :p

[Thor]

From the scuttlebut it can take weeks to repair a hdd especially if you have many bad sectors. The suggestion is after using hdd regenerator a low level format might be in order and then everything is hunky dory.

Another program for the hdd is Steve Gibsom's Spinrite at http://grc.com/spinrite.htm but I don't think it works with NTFS.

Try it Dehcbad25. I'm sure everything on the forum will be interested in the outcome.

[Stripe]

I heard the spinrite app places too much stress on the hard drive so its best to use as a last resort.

Also, I think we are missing the point. If you knew the hard drive was bad, why keep using it? I understand getting the drive up so recover data, but there is really no need to do that. Just use a data recovery program (ERD Commander is excellent) and copy the data off.

[Dehcbad25]

Well, yeahh, we only kept comenting in Thor's finding. The HDD drives bad that I have, some of them had innacesible C partitions, or for example one, had a cluster numbering error skipping a couple of cluster, and making the drive a quarter of its size for the OS. IN that kind of cases it would be nice, since you have data to recover.
Of course, you won't keep using the HDD since they already have a problem. Why risking having same problem all over?
So basically we are still debating about recoverng data in the drive

[cash_site]

Another point to learn from this is to reboot more often. It gives the SMART software a chance to do its job - might have detected the imminent failure earlier giving enough time for BACKUP.

[Dehcbad25]

Good point. I didn't thought about that :D

[Stripe]

Good point regarding the reboot. I guess it would be important on what clusters were bad and what was written to those clusters. In my case, it ended up being my FTP server software folder (possibly due to the constant writing/rewriting of files). I did notice after the hard boot, Win2K did its thing and checkdisk ran and said the folder was un-readable.

As for recovering the data. You would probably want to power down the pc and then boot with either a CD or a floppy with some kind of recovery utility (ERD Commander is great for this). That way, no sectors are overwritten or made unavailable by the OS (you never know where the data is :eek: ). Then, copy essential items off and then attempt the disk recovery. If the disk recovery is sucessful, boot normally and copy the none essential items off.

Does this sound good or are the better ways to do it?