smart... need hellp

[brian]

well this morning i was woken by my brothers cry for help, Apparently his hard drive failed and smart says to back up asap. we bypass it and it starts to boot up vista. it does not get far. it reads the rive because we see the windows logo but it just stays like that... my question. does smart see bad sectors and base it off that or is something wrong worse. i pulled the drive and see if i can backup but it does not make any sound sounds perfect... hope you know what to do.

 

[PC eye]

If you boot from the Vista installation disk you will see the option for repair tools at the bottom of the first spash screen. You choose that over starting the installation in order to use the automatic fix startup problems tool found in the next section.

That can also be used if someone tries to install XP onto a Vista system on a second drive without unplugging the Vista host and Vista fails to load there. That then corrects the boot information.

Try that to see if the drive is still good and the bootup problems are Vista related. A failed drive won't work even when installed into another system.

 

[brian]

thats not the problem. i am getting a smart warning. which vista has nothing to do with. but i am backing it up now. seems to be doing fine. i will just reformat it and try again

 

[oscaryu1]

thats not the problem. i am getting a smart warning. which vista has nothing to do with. but i am backing it up now. seems to be doing fine. i will just reformat it and try again

SMART can be inaccurate at times. I had an WD 3GB that kept on "failing", I suggest running diagnostics on it, if it passes, disable SMART.

 

[PC eye]

Besides disabling the SMART feature in the bios you can test the drive with WD's own diagnostic tools found at http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp and the others seen at http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?swid=1 Their tools will scan for any bad sectors once you download the correct for the model there.

 

[Cromewell]

Before you run any bad sector tests read the documentation that comes with the testing software, it might be data destructive.

 

[PC eye]

Is that another laptop? Just wondering if that is another HP or Gateway model. HP has the Hard Drive Self Test feature on many of their models. You press F11 or the assigned key where the until will conduct a preprogramed test without worry about installing or running some 3rd party utility.

The WD Lifeguard tools themselves install to the drive like any other software while the HP utility is part of the bios programming. Gateway may also have something similar.

 

[brian]

yeah it ia my brothers gateway. i connected it to a linux box and dd it and it was ok. i ran the tests, it passed. i am just going to do a full reformat. ugh. started lastnight and failed at 40%. AFTER 5 HR! so i am just going to hook it up and let it sit over night.

 

[PC eye]

GParted live for cd the 0.3.3.0 release in particular was the last "platform independent" version released some time back will clean the entire drive off by simply deleting the current one or more partitions if that's the way you want to go. Being on a prebuild that would be a way to see the drive lose the hidden recovery information as well.

A simple reformat of the primary should see Vista go right on. The one thing I like about custom builds and Asus boards is the F8 boot menu for selecting the type and drive to boot from while leaving the intended drive set as default in the bios. Once the installer finishes copying everything and the system reboots it automatically sees the installation finish off by seeing the default drive already set.