S.m.a.r.t failures

[marco_1uk]

hi all, i have a toshiba laptop, with a recent upgrade on hdd (40gb to 160 gb) all was well with 160 hdd until the other nite when i tried to open a file i had d/l.....next thing i know av pops up with virus warning (good to know thats working) i delete file, then ever since i get smart predicts....blah blah..press f1 to continue. machine boots but windows gives same failure msg. r these msgs related to king virus (this is what avg found in file). any help in this matter gratefully recieved.
yours peter

 

[d1rtyju1c3]

Download and install HDtune and check the smart section and see if it has errors you can also run the tests and see if it performs ok. You might try running Malwarebytes to check for any malware. I have found that Malwarebytes will find a lot of stuff virus programs wont.

 

[pjmelect]

I second the idea of downloading the free version of Malwarebytes anti-virus program and performing a full scan. I would also go to the Toshiba web site and download their hard drive diagnostics to confirm the state of the hard drive.

 

[marco_1uk]

thnx...will try out and keep u'all posted

 

[hang-the-9]

SMART is a disk health monitor. Usually this comes up when the drive reports to the BIOS some type of issues. I have not seen a virus that fakes this message, but who knows.

 

[d1rtyju1c3]

True but it never hurts to try every possible problem.

 

[hang-the-9]

I should add that if the drive is reporting issues, you will be really well off to replace the drive. You have a much higher chance of a total drive failure sometime in the future even if things seem to work OK now.

Windows can ignore small drive errors and just mark sectors as bad to work around them, but do you really want to trust your files to a disk that is developing those errors?

 

[d1rtyju1c3]

^I agree.

 

[jared_l]

SMART errors are something you shouldn't take lightly. Windows 7 first introduced operating system notifications of SMART errors. I had this problem with a 3 day old Seagate 500GB HDD. My BIOS and Windows 7 were reporting errors for about 2 days until the drive completely died. I would back up data immediately and replace the drive before it's too late.