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Home > Archive > General Discussion > September 2001 > smartdrive error
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| techdaemon 2001-09-19, 11:18 am |
| Ok, this an issue that my company has been going on with for a long time.. the error
"smartdrive has detected imminent failure"
Now, there are two departments at my company.. hardware (which is covered under a warranty) and software (which is fee based).
The hardware department doesn't ever cover it, because they say it's software and the software (which I'm part of) doesn't, because we say it's software.. Now what we do know is that the error means that a failure is impending and will appear in time.
We've looked through all the microsoft knowledge bases and other resources, but we can't find a definate resoloution to this error. Does anyone know about this smardrive error, how to get rid of it.. or how to prove that there is not a software solution, because it is hardware?? Thanks. | |
| darthw 2001-09-19, 2:24 pm |
| Microsoft used to have a disk caching utility called Smartdrive, used with Windows 3.1. However, I suspect this error is related to the ATA-3 standard for hard drives: Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (a.k.a SMART), which enables a PC "to predict impending failure of devices such as disk drives".
I have mainly seen the SMART message you indicate occur at boot up just prior to the the OS loading. On my PC it was coming up when my HDD was about to become unusable. I believe however that many drive manufacturers have drivers that will run in the background and indicate a failure once the OS is running, particularly for a server that is rebooted little.
Sounds like a hardware issue to me, unless the driver is malfunctioning. One thing that might work to verify is to run a disk scanning utility to identify if there are a multitude of bad sectors on the disk. However, first try to get that drive backed up because a disk scan may be the last thing you get out of it. | |
| techdaemon 2001-09-19, 2:39 pm |
| it couldn't be a driver or anything of the sort, because it wouldn't be loaded immediately on startup... because like you said, the error comes up before the os loads. | |
| darthw 2001-09-19, 5:00 pm |
| Definitely hardware then. I'd get a good backup of the drive if the data on it is important. My HDD started giving the same error, and I was still able to boot it a few times. When I scanned it with Disk Doctor it had oodles of bad sectors, and crashed a few boots after. Thankfully I was able to get my data off first.
Most of the newer HDD I know of incorporate SMART technology now. However, it may be possible that the motherboard supports it, but the HDD does not, which might cause such an error. (I am assuming here, not certain.) May be worth checking the HDD manufacturer and verifying that the HDD can use SMART. If not you can usually disable SMART in the BIOS configuration. |
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