Computer help please!

[Howdanrocks]

Ok so recently i have been having a lot of trouble with my laptop's hard drive. It wouldn't boot up my OS and S.M.A.R.T. reported that failure was imminent. So i booted it up with the newest ubuntu cd i downloaded off their website and it is saying this in the SMART Data:

"Overall assessment: Disk failure is imminent"

then when i look at what it's reporting is wrong...

"Reallocated Sector Count: Count of remapped sectors. When the hard drive find a read/write/verification error, it marks the sector as "reallocated" and transfers the data to a special reserved area (spare area)."

It says that there are 523 sectors with this problem. But what I am finding, there are 512 bytes in a sector and my HDD is a 160GB. So that's 171,798,691,840 bytes. And with that, wouldn't there be 335,544,320 sectors total? 523 bad sectors when you have hundreds of millions doesn't seem like a big deal. I'm no computer expert, but is S.M.A.R.T. just over exaggerating?

 

[Dielan9999]

Sounds like a very serious problem. Have you tried formatting it? Or even formatting it while re-installing your latest Ubuntu release?

 

[FuzLogix]

Laptop Hard Drives are very cheap, just buy a new drive.

Why would you even risk putting your data on it when the SMART is reporting a failure?

Failing that and you don't want to buy a new HDD, then it may be possible to disable SMART within BIOS.

This should let you continue to use the Laptop although I wouldn't rely on it.

Also - is your HDD making any odd noises? This can indicate a failure.

Edit to add:
You could try a FULL format, this may mark any bad sectors or use CHKDSK /f to attempt to recover bad sectors.

The Ultimate Boot CD contains alot of HDD diagnostic utilities, may be worth downloading a copy.

 

[Howdanrocks]

Sounds like a very serious problem. Have you tried formatting it? Or even formatting it while re-installing your latest Ubuntu release?

No, I have not. I should also add that I have vista on that HDD, and I am just using ubuntu as a test. Also, I can still access my hard drive's files using a device that basically turns an internal hard drive into an external. I just cant boot from it. And when I do attempt to boot from it sometimes it gives me the message, "Err1 Err3 Operating System not found". Which got me thinking that vista is just horribly corrupted but now SMART is reporting the same thing to ubuntu.

 

[Howdanrocks]

Laptop Hard Drives are very cheap, just buy a new drive.

Why would you even risk putting your data on it when the SMART is reporting a failure?

Failing that and you don't want to buy a new HDD, then it may be possible to disable SMART within BIOS.

This should let you continue to use the Laptop although I wouldn't rely on it.

Also - is your HDD making any odd noises? This can indicate a failure.

Edit to add:
You could try a FULL format, this may mark any bad sectors or use CHKDSK /f to attempt to recover bad sectors.

The Ultimate Boot CD contains alot of HDD diagnostic utilities, may be worth downloading a copy.

Money doesn't grow on trees. The hard drive are around 50 dollars. And anything I cared about has been backed up to a usb drive. I tried disabling SMART withing BIOS but I found no option to do so. And no, my HDD never made strange noises.

Ill look into this Ultimate Boot CD...