failed s.m.a.r.t (old hard drive)

[Squeetard]

No problem. Your english is pretty good, no need to apologize for it.

Yes Enaberif is right, it is foolish to ignore error messages outright.

But you are not, you backed up your data, changed the drive to a non critical use and are now actively seeking information about the problem.

[DarKStar]

What certain people need to understand is taht the BIOS SMART check feature won't just give you an error if you have 1 reallocated sector count :) Also there is a MYTH about that feature that you should always turn it off to speed up system - this myth has been going around for years - Turning this off does NOT disable your drive's internal testing which it does and will keep doing - it simply shuts down the BIOS feature that warns you at post, that your drive(s) have reached a threshold condition. The error message displays only when such a condition occurs, which is why you should rely on your software more than the BIOS, and NOT to wait to reach threshold levels to see gradual failure. Also, be careful about the false sense of security with SMART - it might be good for detecting gradual failures, but it's useless for sudden failures (head crash, controller burnout, or anything mechanical in nature) in other words it's good for about 40% or less.

Also, don't try to "FIX" those errors - if there are increasing amounts of reallocated sectors, just let your drive do its job and reallocate those sectors to the spare ones all hard drives use - don't "FIX" them - if the problem gets worse, the only fix you can do is throw your drive in the garbage and get a new one because MAYBE one of those days your drive will die a sudden death, and SMART won't tell you about it, it only tells you about problems it can detect - There are other more obscure, undocumented checks done, that only HD manufacturers know about, but of course they hide it from you, they don't want you to know this stuff ;-)
And if you are using a hard drive that doesn't support SMART, then you are best to leave that option off of course, obviously :)

I have yet to see the BIOS give a false SMART error and I've used enough hard drives to open a store :D

[CTA]

interesting post... i will keep it in my mind for future reference...

thanks