Screwy SMART status?

[Mike Richardson]

I was loading Tiger onto an eMac. I booted off the external drive and opened Disk Utility and noticed the internal hard drive was red, and SMART status reported it was failing.

I rebooted, and now the hard drive's SMART status is "Not Supported". It's a Maxtor 2F040L0, and the Tiger disk image is copying over right now.

Should I trust this drive or chuck it out?

Edit: Tiger disk copied fine, checksummed fine, and booted fine. SMART status is now Verified.

 

[bizzle]

Run Smart Utility.

http://www.volitans-software.com/smart_utility.php

The built in SMART status nonsense, is well, nonsense and nearly useless.

 

[Charlieman]

Whack the drive into a PC and run Maxtor's DOS diagnostics. Skip the tests and run the low level formatter which will take about two hours. At the end of it you'll know whether the drive is reliable.

Mike may be lucky that his Tiger deployment works; performing a low level format is a good way to avoid whatiffery and load testing.

 

[Mike Richardson]

Whack the drive into a PC and run Maxtor's DOS diagnostics. Skip the tests and run the low level formatter which will take about two hours. At the end of it you'll know whether the drive is reliable.
Mike may be lucky that his Tiger deployment works; performing a low level format is a good way to avoid whatiffery and load testing.

Unfortunately, it is too difficult to remove the drive from an eMac, especially when I have 200 other eMacs to choose from.

 

[NCQU]

Replace the drive #1 Maxtor is not the best drive out there. #2 its probally a 40 or a 60 you would probally be better off with a new 120 or something like that

i have owned macs for a long time now i actually work for a company fixing them and my rule is if it does pass S.M.A.R.T in any way shape or form replace the drive and then i put the drive in a external firewire enclosure and zero it out and then see if that fixes it and gets it out of red if not i throw it away. thants ur best bet

 

[coius]

I have to agree with some of the others. As soon as a drive starts doing "iffy" stuff such as screwing either with smart status, or showing "Failed" then going back to "Verified" I would chuck that drive. It may be a fluke, but do you really want to trust your data or a running config on a drive that can possibly crash, or worse, fry the controller chipset on the Mac/PC that you are using?

Anytime a drive exhibits symptoms that makes me second guess as to whether I should chuck it or keep it, it automatically gets chucked because I don't want to be wrong and it goes bad.

I just chucked 2 HDDs today because one of them was a bit iffy (sometimes windows wouldn't start up, sometimes it would, but the system info logger was recording "Could not read. Bad Blocks") and the other I wasn't sure about, but I had issues with getting windows to stay loaded on the drive upon actually getting it up. Windows error's reported issue reading from the kernel. So both got wiped over 7x and recycled (I don't believe in just throwing them out. The metal and components can be recycled)

So when it doubt, always chuck the drive. Better to be safe than sorry.