"Smart Status Bad" but then not?

[waynegman]

ok a duh moment. I pulled out the tray on the keyboard and the cable under the corner of the small tower which was on the edge of the 5" high shelf pulled off and fell completely flat on the side from 5 inches. Ok I bought a 2TB disk and backed everything up. Writes seem good. I wasn't shocked to get the pri master hard disk SMART status bad when I booted up and had to press the function key to boot windows.

Then after a few boots and a couple days this message seems to have gone away and everything seems ok. Does this error from the shock to the system mean I might not lose the drive. It's might have shrugged off this hit after yelling OUCH "Smart status bad"

 

[Paperdoc]

Go to your hard drive manufacturer's website and download and install their package of disk diagnostic utilities. Seagate has Seatools for DOS in various forms, WD has Data Lifegard. If you run one of these on your drive (preferably outside of Windows, under a bootable mini-DOS disk made by these utilities) one option is to do an exhaustive test of the entire disk surface and fix errors. This takes MANY hours but it's worth it in your case. Unlike Windows' Scandisk, this utility will force a "hidden" operation by the hard disk itself to detect any questionable sectors, replace them with a spare good one from a reserve area, and copy the data from bad to good sector if at all possible. When it is finished any doubtful sectors will have disappeared as far as the outside world is concerned. If this process actually finds and replaces a LOT of bad sectors the stock of good spares may get so small that the SMART system throws you a warning about it. If that happens, definitely plan to replace the disk before the hidden automatic fixer process fails.

After you've done that, I recommend going into Windows and running its Scandisk utility, too, with it set to fix all errors it can. Once those two repair processes are done, you can be reasonably sure your disk is safely usable for now. However, as I said, if you still get SMART warnings, heed them and plan for a replacement before the disk fails completely.