When hard drive makes funny noises...

[Fulmar]

It's a good idea not to push them into service.  I had re-setup my first computer I ever built (p3-933) and played around with Ubuntu throughout the day yesterday.  After not being able to do what I wanted it to do and it not running terribly fast (should have used Xubuntu) I formatted it and went to put on XP.  My first hint should have been after the format/initial XP file copying to it, the first reboot I was greeted with a 'Error loading operating system' message.  So after multiple formats I had assumed something was fubar in the MBR or something bizarre was going on.  So I pulled another old known working HD out and loaded that as the primary master and moved the previous drive to the slave spot.  Formatted fine and setup the XP box up.  Before I went to bed I was sending/writing files to the acting up drive.  The box in my closet was making some unusual noises and I figure that AVG was accessing the CD-ROM drive because I had left the XP disc in it.  So when I awoke I remote desktoped into the box to find the drive had vanished.

No harm done.  Just the death cries of an old drive.  Just a reminder that funny noises aren't usually funny.

[Denholm]

Did S.M.A.R.T. report anything? Thanks for the heads-up.

[Fulmar]

I actually did check the SMART with Speedfan prior to going to bed.  Mainly to check the temperatures of the system.  SMART showed no problems.

[Denholm]

That's interesting. I suppose it's simply a utility to prevent lawsuits.

[Fulmar]

I also forgot to mention this hard drive was an old DeathStar...I mean Deskstar.

[llama]

Smart isn't foolproof, in that the technology has lots of false negatives, but history has proven that it rarely has false positives. In other words:

A failing hard drive might not have any indicators in the SMART readings that it is about to or is failing.

However...

Statistics show that when SMART attributes show that there are problems, you can bet serious money that the drive is really going to fail soon, if it hasn't already.

In other other words:

If a drive shows no impending failures after reading SMART attributes, it really doesn't mean anything, but if you see there are SMART warning signs, plan on the drive failing very soon.

I read a huge statistical study that was posted on slashdot last year, and these were the conclusions.

So you were the victim of a SMART false negative, which is common and means nothing.

-Llama

[Fulmar]

I don't expect much out of hard drives with a MFG date of AUG 2000