CentOS - May 2009 - {SOLVED} Re: OT: SMART warning on hard drive, same warning for 2 1 /2 years

On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 5:10 PM, Lanny Marcus <lmmailinglists at
gmail.com> wrote:
> My wife's box has a very intermittent problem, ?when booting from the
> Maxtor IDE hard drive. This has been going on for about 2 1/2
> years.... The box is a Compaq EVO D300v for the Enterprise. When it
> boots, there is a SMART advisory from the BIOS that says failure is
> immenient. Occasionally, it will not boot, because the BIOS does not
> see the hard drive. ?I replaced the EIDE cable, but ?the problem of
After I posted this yesterday, I turned my wife loose on her computer
and it choked. Possibly a coincidence, after receiving SMART warnings
for a couple of years, and it was ready to die. Thought I had 2 used
hard drives, in perfect condition, but the first one I installed
turned out to be DOA and now the other one is installed..   :-)

Thanks to everyone who replied. As Mark (MHR) wrote, I too was
skeptical of the SMART warnings from the BIOS and when I checked on
the Compaq Support site, a couple of years ago, I was told the Compaq
BIOS is very sensitive and there are a lot of false warnings. However,
after checking the bad hard drive with smartctl yesterday, I am a
believer in SMART warnings....

From: Lanny Marcus <lmmailinglists at gmail.com>
> Thanks to everyone who replied. As Mark (MHR) wrote, I too was
> skeptical of the SMART warnings from the BIOS and when I checked on
> the Compaq Support site, a couple of years ago, I was told the Compaq
> BIOS is very sensitive and there are a lot of false warnings. However,
> after checking the bad hard drive with smartctl yesterday, I am a
> believer in SMART warnings....
>From what I understand, there is a "max number of errors allowed"
before the warnings appear.
This max number is "arbitrary" I guess.
In the past, HP bioses had this max number apparently set too low.
With firmware updates, the max was raised.
So, while you were warned too early, your disk finaly reached the
"real" max.

JD