S.M.A.R.T. fail but disk checking okay, help plz?

Once the SMART test has tripped, you can't reset it. You also cannot trust the drive after a SMART trip. Get a new drive or use the old at your own risk.

Best answer selected by Predator1987.

Thanks ncc, i just want to know what causes a drive to fail like this, i only had a year and this my second drive that kicked the bucket?

I have worked in PC repair for many many years... i honestly do not know what consumers do to there damn HD's to make them fail left and right. I have been using WD green HD's for years and never had one fail, yet when i was in retail sales i would see customers buy a WD green and a week later it would be dead.

all i can say is this. HDD's fail from movement, heat, bad power, vibrations, or extreme cold. do not ever move a computer while its on, laptop or desktop, do not ever shake a HD while is on, do not put any HD in a computer with out direct air flow from outside the case going over the HD. Do not over load a PSU with HD's as voltage spikes or drops can cause damage. Try to always use a UPS battery backup with AVR tech on your computers to provide clean power.

these are all things i do on my systems and have never had a HD fail with out me dropping it or throwing it out a window... my assumptions is that customers do not understand they can not walk around with there laptops on, or that they need to wait a few seconds before moving an external HD after turning it off. they do not understand that if you drop a external HD from waist hight there is a very good chance it will never work again.

Thanksm is it possible that when a pc goes into standby or hibernate mode that it can damage a drive because i ran speedfan and it does not run hot. It runs at around 40 degrees celsius. also is it possible I bought 2 bad drives after each other?

drives spinning up and spinning down does wear on a drive but you need to understand that drives are built to run through an average of spool ups, i think its in the hundreds of thousands if not millions of power cycles. so no, on and off should not harm a drive. i suppose you could have gotten bad drives, that is always possible.


all i know is i have NEVER lost a HD and i have some drives that are over 10 years old. I have lost maybe 2 or 3 drives by dropping them or something to that effect. I did loose 100 drives once when i put a tote full of HD;s in my truck and forgot to close the tail gate... but thats not the drives fault...

I do not know of any tech friends of mine who have had drives fail from use, i seriously think that techs who truly under stand the workings of drives do something that makes drives last that normal consumers do not. I have taken drives that have failed diagnostics, smart and liner verify alike and reconditioned them. i have one of these reconditioned HD's on my system now to store non-important data just in case but its been going for over 2 years now after it failed a bunch of tests in pc-check.

i have a great deal of frustration in regards to this subject of failing drives. i experience dozens if not hundreds of customers a week that have a dead HD that is less than a couple years old... its just ridicules.

Thanks, because i have no idea what i am doing wrong, is there any advice you can give me to prevent these things from happening. i have only been in I.T. support for 2 years now, and i have alot to learn still

i honestly don't know. all i can say is what i have already said about drive maintenance. me and my friends all use high end cases, perhaps there is something about the air flow or the rubber grommets between the HD's and steel of the case for vibration absorption. but i just don't know. i have 9 drives in my main comp, 12 if you count SSD's and none have failed over 2 years.

keep regular checks on the health of your HD, maybe run spinrite every few months or so to ensure good drive health.

a bad sector does not mean a bad drive. i use MHDD from HDDguru to remap bad sectors and get a visual representation of sector health. if i want to fix a bad drive or pull data from it then i use a spinrite lvl 5. i love spinrite, its a great program that no tech should ever be with out. The longest a scan has ever taken was 3 and a half weeks on a 120GB laptop HD that had failed. it managed to recover the data tho.

In these cases, the number of bad sectors was increasing pretty steadily over a period of a few months, which is what led to my concern.

However you reply raised another issue--once you have remapped the bad sectors, do you now trust the drive? Or, do you think there is increased risk because of the evidence of deterioration?

As for Spinrite, I have it, but it apparently it doesn't like the BIOS on this particular machine so it would not run. When I have time to move the drive to another PC (and potentially tie up that machine for a while) I'll try again. Do you spinrite only to recover data or do you run it routinely to maintain drive health?

when i spin rite i use VMware VMmachine and use a HD connected through esata or USB as the VM boxes drive. then i boot spinrite and run it. works great, never had an issue. as for trusting a drive, drives are built with thousands of spare sectors because sectors are expected to go bad. spinrite will show you all the SMART details so you can view that and see if the bad sector count is rising to high for your taste.