[Elvi]

Anyone know if this hdd smart error C8H is a serious one? i can find only litle details on this.

I'd like to know this as i bought an old IDE laptop drive for a pentium 4 era laptop that needed a slight upgrade, then one day i discovered this error while just playing around with the laptop, there's 19 errors of this so far and i don't even know what it does, the hd however works just fine except for that error, no surface problems or anything.

[jaclaz]

Yeah , like you need to be a member of the club and learn the secret hand-shake to be able to simply google for it and get this public document :
http://www.t13.org/d...ibutesAnnex.pdf

Quote

200 C8h Write error rate Number of errors while writing to disk (or)
multi-zone error rate (or)
flying height

How EXACTLY have you checked that the drive "however works just fine except for that error, no surface problems or anything" ?
Check it with it's manufacturer test tool.
If it passes it, it is OK, if it doesn't it is NOT (which does not mean that it will fail tomorrow or the day after, only that it does not meet the requirements it's original manufacturer has set, and I personally believe that the hard disk manufacturer knows more about it's products than anyone else).
Since it is a laptop it is more common that "episodes" (falls/hits/whatever) may have triggered an error.


jaclaz

[Elvi]

I've used Hdd regenertator to check the surface, it usualy finds if something is wrong, tested the mechanics with various other programs and also internal cache, none of these showed any errors, just the SMART test showed up with that error.

The drive is a Fujitsu MHV2080AT PL 80Gb drive, i don't even know if fujitsu has a testing app.

This post has been edited by Elvi: 18 December 2012 - 07:14 AM

[jaclaz]

Elvi, on 18 December 2012 - 07:12 AM, said:

The drive is a Fujitsu MHV2080AT PL 80Gb drive, i don't even know if fujitsu has a testing app.

http://www.benchmark...l?/be_hdd2.html

jaclaz

[Elvi]

error code A101V0... guess even fujitsu's app thinks it's busted

[jaclaz]

Elvi, on 18 December 2012 - 09:17 AM, said:

error code A101V0... guess even fujitsu's app thinks it's busted

Yep, though the general rule is to never trust an hard disk (NEVER), and never, ever consider SMART data to be reliable in a positive way (i.e. a disk sporting "perfect" SMART data may fail in any instant, no matter what the SMART says) a negative SMART setting may be an alarm signal, that in this case seems like being confirmed by the manufacturer tool .

You can still keep using that hard disk, but only if you have a working/checked backup strategy (at least TWO copies of the data on different media) and a sound/tested "recovery from bare metal" method/strategy.

It is well possible that the drive will whirl away happily for another few years before actually failing, though.

jaclaz

This post has been edited by jaclaz: 18 December 2012 - 09:42 AM

[Elvi]

Well i just had left the laptop to be for itself for a while and then when i came back to it, it had shut off the screen like it usualy does BUT the hd almost didn't wake up, took like hm 20 secs atleast before the laptop showed the desktop again.