Hi,
I've got this Dell laptop that displays a warning that my disk is faulty and a failure may be imminent and that I should make a backup and replace the disk immediately. It requires me to press F1 before loading Windows.

Obviously the first time I saw this I panicked and copied the whole Users folder to a flash drive.

But that was 5 months ago and the computer still works fine--I haven't noticed any problems except for that message when I turn it on. Is there an easy way I can remove the error so I don't have to look at it and press F1 every time?

Thanks.

RANT / Yes by replacing the failing hard drive your lucky as heck you got your data off most don't. Why don't you have backups ? They are much cheaper than data recovery. Get a new drive re-load the OS and move on. Its a ticking time bomb at this point in time and you can't suppress the message unless the bios supports turning off the SMART reporting which is a STUPID idea since it just saved your butt. /Rant off

@networks,

I completely agree with your "rant". I wrote something similar, while you were writing yours.

@bo33b,


I'd like to see the full SMART data, including raw attribute values, from the drive (e.g. install HDDScan, which can supply that). Also, if it isn't visible on the SMART output that you supply, please also give the drive's make & model.

However, in general (i.e. without specific knowledge and in some cases, without special expensive software) the answer to your question is no, and it would be a bad idea to do what you are requesting even if you could. Generally, the BIOS checks just the overall SMART pass/fail flag and in my experience it is very rare that there is a false positive of that specific flag (some "SMART monitoring" programs are more likely to give false positives, when they try to interpret the raw values of individual attributes - however I haven't see a BIOS which does that).

Instead of thinking that the drive is OK and you want to stop the warning, it's much more likely that your drive really does have a problem, and you have just been lucky that it has lasted so long! Some types of problem do result in slow degradations - perhaps yours is one of those. We'll get a better idea when you supply the information I mentioned earlier.

Whether you choose to supply that SMART attribute data or not, I suggest you continue to take backups, so that you could cope if the drive did fail. Your choice

Hi,
Thanks for replying. I found the HDDScan program v3.1 on this site and I attached the saved file to this post. The drive is a Seagate Momentus 5400 160GB SATA, I know because I pulled it out.

I know these drives can be found at any store, but it's such a pain to install all the software on them so I will use this until it crashes. I use dropbox so I don't worry too much about files being lost anymore.

Thanks.

Thanks for the info.


You don't have to re-install software on the replacement drive from scratch. Instead, use one of the available cloning utilities, and attach the replacement drive temporarily to the laptop via USB to do this. Some disk manufacturers sell kits with suitable software & a USB-SATA adapter for exactly this purpose.


Good. So since this isn't a critical situation, I'll just briefly give an interpretation of the SMART data:

It's attribute 4 (start/stop count) which has triggered the SMART predictive failure status. Although the drive has only 8520 power-on hours, and 982 power-cycles, it seems to have spun-down (for power-saving) 81978 times (probably actually 81978-982 = 80996 times) i.e. almost 10 times per hour! That seems excessive...

According to Seagate, that drive is spec'd for >600,000 controlled load/unload cycles, but I didn't see a public spec for spin-up/down cycles. By extrapolation from the SMART data, it seems that the spec is likely to be 100,000 cycles, and that Seagate set the SMART trip for when 80% of that expected life had been used. That's my best guess.

Overall, it seems that something (either the drive's own internal Standby Timer, or the BIOS, or the OS) has been set (either in the past, or perhaps still at the moment) to spin-down the drive after a surprisingly short amount of time. For example, if Windows was being allowed to go into standby very frequently (e.g. every 5 mins), then since that spins-down the drive, that would explain the SMART data. Based on their choice of threshold value, Seagate appear to have deliberately given some advance warning before that spec is exceeded.

However you have an underlying problem, i.e. any replacement drive may have the same behaviour i.e. shorter-than-expected life. IMHO, the question you need to answer, based on your knowledge of the laptop, its settings and how it has been used is: Why has the drive been spinning-down approximately 10 times for each power-on hour? When you have that answer, then you have a chance to avoid the same situation happening to any replacement drive.

Hope that helps, but it is based on public info about the drive and my experience, and is not guaranteed to be correct or complete. Drives can fail at any time for many different reasons, e.g. that drive could fail tomorrow due to something completely different, so keep doing backups and investigate the commerical drive installation/cloning kits, if you want an easy way to replace the drive. Good luck!

Thanks Vulcan, I will investigate the cloning solution you mention. I don't know why the spin-down count is so high; the power savings settings are on the aggressive side but not that aggressive. I haven't noticed any problems besides the boot message, so it seems to me the SMART data is inaccurate. If that's not possible, I don't know what to make of it. I'll get another drive just in case.