I'm sure this has been answered everywhere. And I know I'm looking for the Holy Grail.

Maxtor drive decided to call it quits, its part of a FreeNAS setup. I knew the drive was headed south, and purchased a new drive to replace it, shut down the NAS to install the new drive, booted the system up, and got a BIOS warning that this drive needs to be replaced (Press F1 to setup BIOS, F2 to continue). Well, F2 does nothing, just sits at the post screen. F1 goes into BIOS (I know the system isn't locked up), but no option to disable SMART in this HP BIOS.

Just hoping there is a way to get past this error. I can disable SMART on the drive on another system, but as soon as I boot in my NAS, SMART is re-enabled.

I backed up the drive as a sector copy image, restored to another new(2) drive. (this is getting expensive), and put the new new drive in the NAS box, it doesn't see this new(2) drive as the one that needs to be replaced to the new(1) drive. So that's not going to work.

I've been wrestling with this issue for almost 2 weeks now. And unless I can get the old Maxtor to really disable SMART, I do not know what else can be done. It's just killing me to not have access to the FREENAS box. The data has been store of 24 drives that have been in storage for over a decade. (no issues copying the data from them to the NAS box.) (some drives have failed after copying and or moving the data.) Some drives added to the NAS after data moved. So not all data backed up at this point.) I do not have the funds to build the NAS I want, just not an option.

Can I short out the SMART on the IDE board?

(After doing a sector image backup of the Maxtor, I low leveled the Maxtor and did a full scan with Maxtor tools.)
(after getting this drive online, if possible, and getting the NAS to run a replace to the new drive, yes, this Maxtor will get stripped for its magnets, and the carcass tossed into the garbage can)

And help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
~Mark

There's nothing wrong with HDDHackr AFAIK. I killed my drive because I used it wrong. The same can be said about every other HDD tool.

Thanks. Moving the drives and Boot device to another system did not work. So I'll have to do the rename/reserialize the 320GB WD.

Your description is full of details, but after reading it I still can't say I understand the issue completely.

I can't say I know all the niceties of a working FreeNAS system, as we see them when everything is not too shiny, but your approach seems strange to me.
If you still can see the data, make a backup and attempt to revive the system with a new drive - insert it, mark as spare, perform a rebuild.
Since the drive has been dropped out, sector-by-sector copy is likely to be useless, as the data may be out of sync already.

P.S.
Should you get stuck and need an assistance, I can connect and recover data remotely, even if the system was a ZFS RAID-Z.

_________________
• Remote RAID, NAS, SAN, VMware, DVR (CCTV), flash and tape recovery. Data recovery support.

Hmm, how to say this.

Maxtor failed SMART. Drive was part of a RAID array. BIOS will not let me disable SMART. So I cannot boot system with this drive installed.

Array will not work unless this drive is in the array.

I've tried backing up this drive to another (new) drive. Array says 'These are not the droids we are looking for'.

I'm stuck.

Think I just figured it out. We'll see. Will boot system with drive data cable unplugged, as soon as system passes to boot media, I will plug the drive back in. This might work.

Will let you know.