system event 52 - HD Failure Imminent??? 1

[wooglin]

While doing some routine stuff, I noticed some events in the log with the following info:

Event ID: 52, Type: Warning, Source: Disk
The driver has detected that device \Device\Harddisk0\DR0 has predicted that it will fail. Immediately back up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent.

It looks as if the note is being generated with each boot cycle. This is a 6 month old Toshiba Satellite with a 40Gig HD. Regularly cleaned and defraged and no other HD errors to speak of.

Should I be concerned, or just wait for something to happen? New external HD gets here on Monday so I'll have a backup on a regular basis. It's under the extended warranty plan for another 2.5 years.

 

[bcastner]

This is a mesage from the S.M.A.R.T. bios feature, and if I received it on a 6-month old system I would immediately call Toshiba and user their warranty repair service.

The message will continue until you replace the drive. There are fellows in the Hard Disk forum who will be happy to argue that the SMART system is not very smart, and their arguments are good ones.

I am not very familiar with the Toshiba return/repair under Warranty deal; my preference if possible is to arrange a "cross shipping" arrangement, where a new device is delivered, and the old returned within xx days. The advantage is I can then connect the old and new computers, and copy or image the old to the new.

As this is a notebook, be aware that there should be available at any good computer store local to you, and easily from the internet, an inexpensive adapter that would allow you to mount the laptop hard disk drive in a desktop workstation as a slave device. These run around US $5-6, and are worth their weight in gold. Your desktop likely has more resouces to make a disk-to-disk copy possible.

If you do not own Symantec Ghost, Acronis, Drive Image or other imaging utilities, head to the utility section of the manufacturer of your hard drive. Nearly all offer a free download of utility/setup software that can do a drive-to-drive copy.

 

[wooglin]

Damn.... If a reply like that came from anyone but you bcastner, I'd blow it off as over-reacting.

Star for you.

Knock on wood, so long as it lasts another 3 days all will be good. Thanks for the red alert.

 

[bcastner]

wooglin,

I had an HP recently that threw the same errors. I did a lot of clever tricks to repair the hard disk, and two days later it would throw the errors again.

The hard thing about SMART drives is that they keep a table of entries about disk problems. I even went as far as rewriting the SMART table on the drive using some very low level assembler routines. I was sure there was not a serious problem with the hard disk.

Bang the errors came back. I did exactly what I described above, I returned the box with a cross shipping option, and imaged the original drive to the new one.
And will never try to low-level resolve a SMART drive reporting problems again. I suspect the SMART system is smarter than me.

Thank you wooglin for your kind comments, and Happy New Year.

Bill

 

[bcastner]

For anyone caring to repeat my failed efforts:

I went to the IBM web site, as they are the authors of the SMART system for drives. I used the information found to write a new SMART record database entry, and used Assembler to call the IDE adapter for direct sector writes to record a clean SMART database entry.

I then used a trial version of a great utility, Active Smart, to monitor the drive:

http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/

The SMART database began populating with errors. That is when I called and RMA'd the box.

Personally I would rather not have SMART enabled drives in my systems; and never in a Server. I am not alone in believing that the SMART feature is a problem itself.

However, if a SMART enabled drive starts throwing errors, you need to replace it. Having worked fairly creatively to beat the system, it beat me instead.

 

[wooglin]

Very cool Utility. Downloaded activeSMART and got more detail:

ID 05 - Reallocated Sector Count has a threshold of 5 and the level is currently 1 (which it says is BAD)

There was a past error for HD temp, but I think only due to the fact that it was on my lap and had no airflow. (current temp is 34*C) Everything else seems to be within normal parameters.

 

[bcastner]

The drive holds back a number of sectors and swaps them in when it detects hard errors on the disk.

It looks like you are down to one spare sector, an indication of a hard disk problem.

 

[micker377]

bcastner:
You made a comment about not liking "SMART". Is this a real possible problem, or "one more layer" to cause problem?

 

[bcastner]

I still have a prejudice based on how horrible the original SMART drives proved to be. Google "IBM deskstar deathstar drive problem"

It may have nothing to do with SMART as a drive BIOS enhancement. On its face, SMART seems to be a good idea. And in the last two years have had no particular problem with SMART drives.