Active SMART Disk Monitor

[aye29]

Anyone use Active SMART to monitor disk health. One of my drives has a value called 'Unknown Attribute' and attribute ID 'BE" which is beyond the threshhold value and causing the program to report that the drive is about to fail. Only one of my drive has this unknown attibute and if I turn my computer off for a while and restart the value reads normal for a while. Anyone know whats going on?

 

[Osiris]

is that a setting in the bios?

 

[aye29]

What setting are you reffering to? Active SMART is a Windows program that monitors disk health. I do have SMART monitoring enabled in BIOS as well but that doesn't say anything.

 

[Osiris]

I was referring to SMART, Im not sure If I trust that program, have you searched their site for that problem?

 

[aye29]

Nothing on their sit about it. Right now everything is working fine so I'm probably just going leave it alone for now.

 

[Osiris]

Personally I wouldnt worry about it....

 

[eric_harris_76]

My mom's PC was getting an error message at boot time about the S.M.A.R.T. disk monitoring detecting problems which could result in the disk becoming unusable at any time. (I paraphrase.) This appeared consistently at reboot, though the times I used the machine, nothing bad happened.

She was also several months behind in her Windows Update downloads. After I made her current, I saw no more of those messages. (I think. I wasn't diligent in checking for them.)

Questions:
(1) Was there really a risk of losing the hard drive, or was it/Windows just being extra cautious?
(2) Could a Windows Update download address the underlying problem on the disk, and make the problem go away (by reassigning blocks to other physical locations, or not reporting a nonexistent problem, or whatever)?
(3) Was there a fix in a recent Window Update download (March-June, 2006) which addressed the problem which caused the (presumably accurate) S.M.A.R.T. disk error message?

-Eric