SMART Event Fault

C

CaptainTrips

New Member
I was using my PC, just browsing the web when windows poped up a generic "Windows detected a hard disk problem." with no real helpful information other than it was on my Seagate ST31500541AS secondary drive.

Luckily, I was able to backup all information off the drive. In fact, I had just setup synctoy to mirror the drive to my external because I was paranoid of data loss 2 days ago. "Lucky" me. So no data is lost. that's not an issue here.

Now my RAID BIOS reports the drive as having a SMART Event. This causes windows to pop-up a window every 10 minutes or so saying "Windows detected a hard disk problem," taking focus away from what ever I am doing.

I have run a basic chkdsk with no errors. A chkdsk /B was going so slowly through the files that I canceled it with the intention of running it overnight instead. I went to seagate's website, and to satisfy them, I downloaded their hard disk diagnostic program. The "Fast Generic" scan showed no errors. the "Slow Generic" option was going so slow, I intend to run it over a different night.

I'm going to try to RMA the drive. I don't want to clear the SMART event and just wait for failure. However I have two questions:

1) How do I clear the SMART Event? I might not need to, but if seagate won't RMA the drive, I will have to. My RAID BIOS is so stripped down that it only has options for create a raid, delete a raid, reset drives to non-raid, and exit. Nothing else. (Reset drives to non-raid does not clear the error). I am not running a raid at the moment. My PC BIOS does not have any options for SMART. I disabled the drive in the bios so it would stop bugging me for the moment. I've also opened the case, taken out the drive, let it sit on my desk for an hour, plugged it back in with a different SATA cable. No luck there either.

2) Do you have a good recommendation on a data scrubbing tool? I have nothing illegal on the drive, but I do a lot of photography and sell a good portion of my work, so I have A LOT of IP on the drive (over 10 years worth of photos!). It's backed up, so I'd like to delete it and scrub it so seagate doesn't have access to my old deleted files. Call me paranoid.

Thanks in advance for the advice.
 
Well. If you ran the Seagate diagnostics and it did not return an error, I do not think Seagate will accept your drive as RMA. Pretty sure I read that on the Seagate website, back when my original Laptop seagate drive started to have cluster errors.. [Was cloning it to my new bigger drive, had no idea it had started to fail.] As for the notifications... I dunno, but can you disable "SMART Event" in your BIOS?
 
I went into live chat with Seagate and they were surprisingly helpful. A new drive is being sent to me with an additional "approved packaging" postage pre-paid box. Should be here in 5 or so days.

Still not sure I like Seagate's drives (this one was a gift). But their customer service seems pretty good.

I asked the person I had in chat about their clause where they will send the drive back to you and charge you for shipping if they deem it to be fine, and he said "It hasn't happened in the time I've worked here." "And that's 2 years," so I am pretty sure this is going to be ok.

However: I still haven't scrubbed the drive though, can someone recommend me a good free drive scrubber? I'd really like to scrub it before sending it back.
 
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