[suey3b]

I was asked by a friend to clean a computer up for her as it had been her father's and she was giving it to a nephew. She wanted any/all inappropriate websites/links, etc cleaned off of it before giving it to her nephew. I ran all kinds of things on it, (CLEANUP, SPYBOT, ANTIVIRUS, etc) and then tried to reinstall WIndows XP on it. It looked as though it was going through the install as it was asking what partition to load it to, etc, but then when it rebooted, it came up with the following error message:

PRI MASTER HARD DISK: S.M.A.R.T. Status BAD, Backup Data

Please help. What happened and how do I fix it???

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Did you perform a full format before installing Windows XP?

[bmwboy]

Did you perform a full format before installing Windows XP?

[suey3b]

No, should I have?? How?

[crash override]

During the install when it asks you what partition toload the OS on, you should also have the option to delete and create new partitions. After recreating the partitions, setup will then ask you what file system to format in, either FAT32 or NTFS. Have a read at http://www.michaelst...nxpinstall.html, he has a good step by step prcedure to follow.

[peter99]

Receiving S.M.A.R.T. status bad backup and replace error.

S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) is a diagnostic method originally developed by IBM that at that time referred to as "Predictive Failure Analysis". This technology was developed for IBM mainframe drives to give advanced warning of drive failures. Based on this diagnostic, Compaq announced IntelliSafeTM, which was submitted to the ATA/IDE standards committees and the resulting standard was named S.M.A.R.T.

S.M.A.R.T. analyzes many of the mechanical attributes; over time, some failures can be predicted by detecting if the hard disk drive is moving out of tolerance. While the S.M.A.R.T. technology can detect upcoming issues, not all hard drive failures are predictable.

Not all hard drive failures are predictable, but by analyzing many of the mechanical attributes over time, some failures are predictable and this is what S.M.A.R.T. does. S.M.A.R.T. measures many attributes of the user's drive over time and decides if they are moving out of tolerance.

Cause:

Hard disk drive is bad or is going to fail soon.

Solution:

Backup your information and contact the manufacturer of the computer or hard disk drive for replacement or additional help.

Additional Q&A:

If I am receiving the S.M.A.R.T. error, is it ok if I continue to use my hard disk drive and do not replace it?
As stated above, S.M.A.R.T. is designed to detect upcoming failures in the hard disk drive. While it is possible that the hard disk drive may not fail for several months, it is still inevitable that the hard disk drive will fail. It is ok to continue to use the hard disk drive, however, we highly recommend that if you are still under warranty that you consider getting the drive replaced before your warranty runs out.

Note: Many users can also enable / disable the S.M.A.R.T detection through their CMOS setup.

Edited by peter99, 12 October 2006 - 08:26 AM.