[hollowfire42]

My friend convinced me to build my own computer. Unfortunately, said friend is no longer around and I have no idea how to fix my problem. Anyway, the computer's got a pentium 4 and a good Asus motherboard with PCI express and everything. I tried to get all quality parts. Anyway, my problems started when, for no apparent reason, the CD/DVD drive wasn't working. I went in and unplugged it from the power supply and plugged it back in with another one of the plugs coming from the power supply, hoping it would help, but when I tried turning it on it wouldn't boot up, saying there was no boot device. I went into BIOS and somehow, it had stopped recognizing my hard drive. I tried fixing it again by mixing and matching different plugs and cords from the power supply in both the CD drive and the hard drive, and I actually got it to run, but not like it did before. Now for no apparent reason my computer was recognizing the CD drive as the primary IDE master boot device, while my hard drive was the fourth IDE master. At least it ran, but it was considerably slower. It was like this for a few days (I didn't want to mess it up more, so I left it as it was) but now yet again it stopped working. This time (once again, for no reason that I can tell) it has decided to stop booting up again, telling me that the fourth IDE master (my hard drive) has a S.M.A.R.T. status of BAD, and that I should "back up and replace" it. I have no idea what the heck S.M.A.R.T. is for one, and I have never heard of a way to back up a hard drive. It gives me the option to continue anyway, but when I do it tells me there was a disk read error, and makes me restart. What is going on? Making my own computer has been a bad decision, because now I'm helpless. Does anyone have any idea how to help me, or should I just get a professional to work on it? This is causing me great frustration. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) is a diagnostic method originally developed by I.B.M. for their mainframe drives to give advanced warning of drive failures. Large mainframe data centers wanted to know in advance if a hard disk drive was going to fail, because this gave them the opportunity to take steps to protect their data. Later Compaq announced a diagnostic which operated with a number of different disk drive manufacturers. These products were submitted to the ATA/IDE standards committees and the resulting standard was named S.M.A.R.T. Today all major hard disk drive manufacturers support S.M.A.R.T., including IBM, Western Digital, Quantum, Seagate, and Fujitsu.

How can S.M.A.R.T. help a PC end-user? Not all hard drive failures are predictable, but many mechanical failures are predictable and this is where S.M.A.R.T. can be of help to PC end-users. S.M.A.R.T. measures many attributes of the user's drive over time and decides if they are moving out of tolerance. Knowing that your hard drive is going to fail and doing something about it, is infinitely better than having one crash in the middle of writing an article. Backing up one's hard drive and possibly replacing it are far better options than recovering a failed drive.

Keep in mind that most hard disk drives, even if they are S.M.A.R.T. enabled, do not have S.M.A.R.T. turned on. When you install BelDrive this will turn on S.M.A.R.T. and begin tracking your drive attributes. S.M.A.R.T. is only useful when you track these attributes over a period of time.

For more information about S.M.A.R.T., please click here for a pdf document by IBM:

These are sample S.M.A.R.T. attributes. Each drive uses its own set of attributes to measure its S.M.A.R.T. status.

    * Head flying height data
    * Throughput performance
    * Spin-up time
    * Re-allocated sector count
    * Seek error rate
    * Seek time performance
    * Spin try recount
    * Drive calibration retry count

You should be able to repair the HD, put all your hardware in the way it was meant to be reset your cmos and reinstall windows. To backup your data put the HD in another computer and copy the files onto another hard drive on that comp it doesnt have to be all of them just the ones you want.

[warriorscot]

S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) is a diagnostic method originally developed by I.B.M. for their mainframe drives to give advanced warning of drive failures. Large mainframe data centers wanted to know in advance if a hard disk drive was going to fail, because this gave them the opportunity to take steps to protect their data. Later Compaq announced a diagnostic which operated with a number of different disk drive manufacturers. These products were submitted to the ATA/IDE standards committees and the resulting standard was named S.M.A.R.T. Today all major hard disk drive manufacturers support S.M.A.R.T., including IBM, Western Digital, Quantum, Seagate, and Fujitsu.

How can S.M.A.R.T. help a PC end-user? Not all hard drive failures are predictable, but many mechanical failures are predictable and this is where S.M.A.R.T. can be of help to PC end-users. S.M.A.R.T. measures many attributes of the user's drive over time and decides if they are moving out of tolerance. Knowing that your hard drive is going to fail and doing something about it, is infinitely better than having one crash in the middle of writing an article. Backing up one's hard drive and possibly replacing it are far better options than recovering a failed drive.

Keep in mind that most hard disk drives, even if they are S.M.A.R.T. enabled, do not have S.M.A.R.T. turned on. When you install BelDrive this will turn on S.M.A.R.T. and begin tracking your drive attributes. S.M.A.R.T. is only useful when you track these attributes over a period of time.

For more information about S.M.A.R.T., please click here for a pdf document by IBM:

These are sample S.M.A.R.T. attributes. Each drive uses its own set of attributes to measure its S.M.A.R.T. status.

    * Head flying height data
    * Throughput performance
    * Spin-up time
    * Re-allocated sector count
    * Seek error rate
    * Seek time performance
    * Spin try recount
    * Drive calibration retry count

You should be able to repair the HD, put all your hardware in the way it was meant to be reset your cmos and reinstall windows. To backup your data put the HD in another computer and copy the files onto another hard drive on that comp it doesnt have to be all of them just the ones you want.

[Rockster2U]

Based on your comments and level of experience, you would be well advised to take this to a reputable technician so he/she can get things squared away for you.

[hollowfire42]

Okay, thanks a lot for the help guys. I've decided I'm probably going to just take it in to a professional rather than risk screwing it up more myself.