I read that if you get enough warnings that your hard drive will fail, it will lock you out of your hard drive and you wont be able to start your computer. How do I disable SMART?

I dont belive thats true. SMART technology can detect problems with your hard drive, and for the most part it is right in most cases.

From what i have seen SMART will allow you to try to boot, but will advise you that the disk may fail.
More like a warning system then anything.
If you still wish to disable it, you can find it in your mainboards bios.
Hit Del on startup...it will be somwhere in the advanced section or the IDE config...it varys from bios to bios.

|Drew|

How does SMART work? Does it work on any HD or just the one's manufactured after 1998?

tbh, I thought it only monitored and warned on the temp of the HD.

SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) will not disable your hard drive. It just allows a SMART enabled device to report to the system when it detects a problem that could lead to a failure; you do have to be using a hard drive or other device that supports this feature.

I had an 8GB IBM drive that developed a few bad sectors, and SMART gave me a warning every time I started the computer. I disabled SMART reporting in the BIOS but it still gave the error. It did this for years though and no other problems developed.

Its telling me that a failure could be iminent. I have over 50 GB free because of a format a couple months ago, and I did a scandisk and no error's showed up, so Im not sure exactly whats wrong. Should I just ignore it? I have nothing important on my computer that I would need.

Never ignore such errors, but if you need to check your harddrive and see if the sectors are recoverable you might try hdd regenerator, this tool scans and tries to repair bad sectors on a disk, i have tried it with much success..

www.dposoft.net

What kind of hard drive? And what kind of system is it in?

I have seen drives within hours of the error first coming up to running for years as previously mentioned. Its all in what caused the error.

Most drives and many systems have some sort of additional diagnostic which will chekc the smart status.
For instance on Dell Optiplex systems made in the last 2 years or so have hard drive diags built in. press ctrl-alt-d during post to run. But it will only return a fail code or a pass message. Other systems/diags return different info.

check them for bad sectors
but using windows xp's checkdisk won't help it.
I think win98 scandisk was better than checkdisk.(in some ways)

I would try a lowlevel format or Zero fill. I have seen it clean up this type of mess many times in the past.
IF still you have problems, just dont keep anything of serious imporatnce on the drive.
Also..is the drive under warentty? if it is return it...that is a valid reason to get a brand new one from manufac.

|Drew|

I would recommend acronis products
though I'm not sure about where to find a low level format util
they existed in the bios in the past but not anymore

I have a Maxtor hard drive. My computer is a Sony Vaio and Im using Windows XP.

so do you have warranty?
just recently someelse had a problem with maxtor and he shipped it back they changed it and sent a new one. I don't know if sony would do that but you could talk with maxtor.
sony should be able to that also I think.

its never good under any circumstances to disable SMART.

its always great to share the name of that really hot women in your signature Xtreme ! - Cara Wakelin

yes I though about that but I had given up the idea. I've my reasons.
I'll go ahead and put the name there. I see you know her as well (PB)

and yes the smart issue. Its implemented so that the user would be warned if the hdd has a problem. Hdd doesn't lock you out. Who else does it have, if its not going to trust you.

and I'm wondering where in the heck did you read about that? must have been a very wrong site
don't visit that site anymore

Hey i did not know here i just hit the properties on the pic and the filename of the jpg has her name !

And Holy !!!!! THAT IS ONE HOT GIRL, wow.
Link Removed No Porn Links plz
I have had 1 bad sector so far on my Maxtor Drive, and if i get one more i will call in teh warrenty

!! not a free site
won't stop me now. I hope they won't send spam

someone mentioned HDD regenerator,
they say that it somehow manages to change the signals on the hdd's so they get read even when they're bad sectors

though I haven't tried it. It says lots of stuff about windows but when I ran it it wanted to create a disk for dos ?
I don't use diskette tech anymore

Bootable cd-rw
use once and erase
(Check your PM Xtreme )

Link Removed No Porn Links plz

anyways I got it
now I want to leech that page download all of it!

aa yes bootable cd-rw but its kind of messy to create one.
I had used BFD v1.0.7 Bart's of course
it had took a while after I understood it. I was updating one of my firmwares or bios or something...

going waaaaay off-topic here... :/

ayy real sorry
I had forgotten about the topic.
I though it was cara
shall I edit it or do you want to remove them

i use the windows 98 SE botable cd for dos and a cd-rw with the files i need to use in dos

~I understand Drew

well yea u're right
by the time I had to apply my firmware/bios update
I had no time to dl win98 bootable.
aay nevermind still offtopic I stop now...Sorry!

but I do think that hdd smart issue have been resolved...

i dont know how to enable SMART in my bios ?

well if you go to your bios look through the tabs and u'll see
enable smart on all hdd's or somthing similar
which kind of bios are u using?
it should tell it when u boot your computer
amibios or the other (I forgot the rest )

IF you have questions, you could refer to the mobo manual or if you dont have that check the mobo manufactors website for some instruction.

|Drew|

Today when I turned on my computer, there was no warning like there had been before. Does SMART stop warning you after a certain amount of time, or do my problems seem to be cleared up?

they tend to clear up

I was listening to music and all of a sudden my computer just turned off. It started up again and did a scan disk and said one of the things in my temporary internet folder was not valid and truncated it, and then froze. I turned off the comp and restarted and it went through the scan disk and finally I was able to log on. I got a microsoft error report that said I had just recovered from a serious error, reported it, and got this:


"Error Caused by a Device Driver

Thank you for submitting an error report. Unfortunately, we cannot provide you with specific information about how to resolve this problem at this time. The information that you and other users submit will be used to investigate this problem."


I havent installed any programs lately, and I checked for updates and I had them all. Should I expect a crash soon, or is it hard to say?

how often do you defrag your hdd?
I think there were some crosslinked files.
similar thing happened to me. I was also listening music (on winamp)
then I wanted to open up a game, dang!
I seriosly don't remember what I did. but this is an error caused once a while bc something got messed up. (again I think crosslinked)

I can talk about my past errors all day long... driver problem, not registered properly, device opening failed. device not working..,driver not found.

is there anything missing or any exclamation mark on any hardware u got?

best thing to do, backup your stuff and format... (I mean I like this method, always worked)

I don't know I'd love to help... I'd say wait for the others...
but since ms doesn't have any info on the file I'd say defrag