2 bad drives in a row or is windows crazy?

[Andon48]

I bought a 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ like 7 months ago. I started getting a "Windows Detected a Hard Disk Problem" error about a month ago. It popped up about every 15 min-1/2 hour. After searching the net and finding nothing I decided to RMA the drive. I got my replacement, cloned the old drive to the new one, and it was fine for about a day and now I'm getting the stupid message again. I was on Windows 7 Ultimate X64 SP1 beta, so I uninstalled the SP1 beta, and the IE9 beta thinking that might help. It didn't. Could Windows be thinking that it is still the same drive and I have to replace it, I mean do I need to clear the error info. for the old drive or something? I've scanned both drives with Seatools, Samsung's HUTIL, and checked the drives for errors with Windows and they seem to be fine. The only strange thing I found was when I used the in depth online analysis in speedfan on the first drive it said the throughput performance was below the threshold defined by the manufacturer. Everything is fine on the new drive. I know there are always defective electronics, I'm just skeptical that I got 2 bad drives in a row.

 

[jsc]

It's possible, but not likely.

 

[Hawkeye22]

This message can pop up if a SMART value is out of spec or if the drive temperature goes above spec.

 

[Andon48]

It's def. not the temp, The drive is by itself in the front of an Antec 300 case with 2 120mm intake fans about 1 inch away blowing over and under it. And everything I check it with says it is okay, wouldn't one of the tests I ran on it tell me if there was a SMART value out of spec? And I don't know if this is of any relevance but when searching for others who got this error, like 4 out of 5 people had Samsung F1 or F3 HDDs. Maybe one of their predefined SMART values are unrealistic? I have no clue, maybe it's just a coincidence.

 

[Hawkeye22]

It depends on what tests you ran. Most just scan for bad sectors and such. Try HDTune or Smartfan. Both of these can read/display the SMART status.

I think two bad drives is coincidental, but it doesn't hurt to check... or make a backup, just in case.

 

[Andon48]

I'll try HDTune, and I'm guessing you meant speedfan. My results from speedfan are in my original post.

 

[Hawkeye22]

Doh, yes, I meant speedfan. Other than the in-depth analysis, did you look at the actual smart values to see which parameter was out of spec?

If HDTune shows a smart value out of spec too, then this is probably the reason winows is throwing out the message.

As a test, if your bios has the option to turn SMART off, then do this and see if the message stops popping up. You can re-enable it after testing.

*Edit*
I'm assuming windows will not bypass the bios and read the smart values directly from the drive itself, but I don't know this for certain.

 

[Andon48]

How exactly do you look at the SMART values? Everything I've seen shows fine with the new drive, speedfan says the drive health is 98% and it passes the SMART test okay in seatools. After I put the new drive in, I went to the bios and it said SMART was disabled so I enabled it. I'll try disabling it, but I'm pretty sure it was disabled before with the first drive when the error started popping up in the first place.

 

[Hawkeye22]

Speedfan smart values should look like this (you may have to click on the smart tab to view the pic):

http://www.almico.com/sfscreenshots.php

For hdtune, see this page. Scroll down a ways for the screen shots. It's the picture on the right - click it to view.

http://hd-tune.en.softonic.com/

If smart is disabled in the bios, then windows is reading values directly from the drive, bypassing the bios.

HDTune will just show OK in the status column. Speedfan put an OK icon next to it's categories. If there is no status, then the value is irrelevent or not used.

 

[Andon48]

Speedfan had a green OK or a blank space by everything in the list with both drives. I'll try HDTune tonight and see what it says.

 

[Andon48]

Best answer selected by Andon48.

 

[Andon48]

I solved it, and posted it earlier but it's not here for some reason. Anyway, I went into the bios to disable SMART and I found that it was already disabled. I enabled it and I haven't gotten the error all weekend so I think that did it. Thanks for the help.