Update on my SMART problem.

I am having problems posting so trying to keep it brief.

I have now managed to reboot without the SMART problem,
it reboots as normal with no mention of SMART problems.
However when I check the drive with varius tests it still reports it as
not suporting SMART and has no SMART stats availlable.

 

I'd have to go read the ATA spec, to see if there is a way
to disable SMART. It really shouldn't get turned off.
(If you don't like it, you just ignore it )

SMART reports passively collected statistics (like how
many sectors have required reallocation). But there are
also some internal tests it can run. It's possible
things like Seatools or the WD Diagnostics trigger these.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T

"Self-tests

SMART drives may offer a number of self-tests:

Short

Checks the electrical and mechanical performance as well
as the read performance of the disk.

Long

A longer and more thorough version of the short self-test,
scans the entire disk surface"

HTH,
Paul

 

I seem to remember I could run a smart test from the bios on the good drive,
i ran the short test but there was an option to run a longer one, however
I could not run them on the bad drive, there was no option to because
ut said smart was not supported (or similar message).
That was before I cured the boot problem so it might have changed, however
I can't run the test from any of the disk utilities from windows so I very
much doubt
I will be able to do a bios one.


Something here about the drives and thier problems:-

http://datacent.com/datarecovery/hdd/samsung/SP2514N


"One of the most common problems Samsung SpinPoint hard drives experience is
burnt cuircuit board(PCB). Samsung drives are very vulnerable to power
overheating and power surges. Often bad power supply unit combined with
power streak is enough to burn spindle driver chip on the electronics and
make data inaccessible. Should this occur the computer would reboot itself
or shutdown completely, you would normally notice acrid smell and smoke and
the drive will no longer spin up"

and

"Samsung hard drives could also suffer from firmware problems. If part of
firmware becomes corrupted the drive fails to initialize correctly and stops
working as expected. The drive usually sounds normal but does not identify
in BIOS or shows up with zero capacity. If you attempt to boot up from such
drive or read any data from it you would get "Primary Master Hard Disk
Fail", "No operating system found" or "Disk boot failure" or some other
SMART error on boot up. "

 

Yes, at one time, there were a few data recovery web pages that
were worth reading.

Now, they put that content on the web pages, for SEO purposes.
(So their data recovery company page will appear in search results,
not as a means to help you.)

It's true, there was a WD or Seagate drive at one time, that had a
spindle motor controller IC that would burn up. A later model of
the IC in question, would stop that (it ran cooler).

The drive has a couple transient protection devices on the +5V and
+12V rails. They're intended to stop inductive transients when
drives are hot inserted in servers. If a desktop computer ATX supply
has a sustained overvoltage problem on either of those rails,
the transient protection device burns. This would happen on any
brand of drive. So we could write up a web page full of mournful
warnings, for something that is an inevitable part of the design.
(If you don't have transient protection, the drive could be
fried for other reasons.)

Your evidence seems to suggest the SMART subsystem has shut
down on the drive. But I don't see a mechanism for it. The
controller board on the drive, has its own processor and
firmware. SMART is just a routine to run, for that firmware.
The controller is still reading the disk, so the hardware
part of it would seem to be working. The only question would
be, what would cause the SMART routines to stop running.

http://smartlinux.sourceforge.net/smart/faq.php

"How to disable S.M.A.R.T. ?

S.M.A.R.T. monitoring can only be disabled from the system BIOS
(Basic Input/Output System).

S.M.A.R.T. remains enabled on the drive.
"

And that's my understanding as well, that if the drive
supported SMART in the first place, it will always
be running. The drive is always gathering statistics.

*******

OK, I checked my copy of the Hitachi Feature Tool manual,
and there is a setting to enable or disable SMART. Why
this would have changed on your drive, is a mystery. If you
use the Hitachi (formerly IBM) tool, there is no guarantee
it will work. It's not guaranteed to work with all brands
(but the ATA spec is a standard). But the tool is worth a try.
See page 18. The text here suggests some drive brands, the
setting (disable) will not survive from session to session.
The manual is about 5.9MB.

http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/downloads/FTool_User_Guide_215.pdf

Samsung has a tool as well. There are download links, next to
a list of commands the tool runs. The search term that got
me here was "ESTOOL", but HUTIL is mentioned as well.

http://www.samsung.com/sec/consumer/learningresources/hdd/utility.html

Generally, a lot of disk tools like that, they're designed to
run from a DOS floppy. Sometimes, the package will include
a copy of FreeDOS. Seagate does that with their Seatools for DOS
for example. The only problem you might run into (at least
in Seagate's case), is they don't always have driver support
for just every disk storage interface under the sun. My last
two computers, Seatools can't "see" disks on my computer.
Only the older computers worked with it. From that perspective
(driver support), there is no guarantee that kind of tool will
be able to see the disk. But you can still try it if you want.

Paul

 

the drives and thier problems:-

Well first things first, I tried to boot up today and go straight into
the BIOS to look at the SMART suff for the drive however it just hung and
I could not get in at all. Indeed I could not boot up basically whether I
selected
the boot menus the bios or left it to boot normallynothing worked.
I did get the SMART screen once but I have never got past that before.

So I don't realy seem to be getting anywhere.
One thing I do notice when I remove the bad drive is that at boot I can hear
the drive spinngnig up, so that never happens with the bad drive on
(usuallly).

So I am unsure how to explain what is happening, maybe the drive draws too
much
power?

Anyhow I can't really do anything unless I can boot with the drive
connected..

It seems hit and miss whether I can boot up with th bad drive on,
unpredictable
behaviour, so that is either mechanical or electricl problems.

I may have a go at booting with just the bad drive on, it shold have more
power
that way,, mind you that might kill it for good and posibly the whole
computer - lol

 

"

Well just an update, I have not been able to boot up witht he bad drive on
at all
really, it had been a bit random if I could boot up with it connected but
recently I
can't see to boot with it conencted at all.
Anyhow I was down the computer store (PC world) and noticed they had some
reasonable priced IDE enclosures which was a surprise, however they were
'pre-owned'
anyhow I got one and connect the bad drive and it worked perfectly fine.

So it makes it annoying that it does not work in my PC, however at least I
have
easy access to the data on it, whcih seems to be all there and in good
order.

I think theere may be a BIOS update fot the computer which might possible
help
but I think that requires a floppy drive which I don't have. Also I don't
think I would attempt that
untill I have another PC incasse it does not work and leaves the PC
unbootable.

 

Well just an update, I have not been able to boot up witht he bad drive on

http://www.tech-forums.net/forums/f84/hp-pavilion-zt3000-help-bios-s-m-r-t-hdd-error-191285/

Above thread about similar SMART bios problems.
The guy put in a new drive and got the same smart error!