Member Avatar for Lancenova

[Moderator's note: post has been split from this older thread]

Have to write this again as the window apparantly closed out on me mid question....anywho....

I am having a similar problem where when the computer is loading up and after detecting the primary and slave drives it will state that the S.M.A.R.T. command is capable but not functional and then continues on to start from a bios state saved in the IDE-0 and after finding it, it will inform me that the S.M.A.R.T. command has failed and that I press F1 to continue. Now I have had no real problems with performance on my computer as it is slow due to the lack of RAM (256MB) I have and I try to run a few things at once.

But once in a rare occasion after transfering my computer to another location, it will notify me after trying to load up that the NTLDR is "missing" and that I should press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart. Would this be concidered a fault with the drive, bios, or simply some other issue that is eluding me at the moment?

I currently have a Maxtor 5T010H1 9.5 gig hard drive
and also a WDC WD400EB-00CPF0 drive (what the device manager lists it as) and that is a 40 gig capacity.
I run Win XP Pro with a AMD Duron(tm) Processor with about 750Mhz processing power (really bad I know. lol all I could afford after loosing my toshiba laptop)

but any help would be appreciated. I have access to gain new hard drives cheap, but I'd rather know that it's the hard drive before I spend money and find out it's just a bad bios that I could have replaced for free.

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Dani AI

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Short, practical follow-up that builds on 's advice and 's report: treat a POST "S.M.A.R.T. failed" message as a clear warning, not a guarantee, that the drive is unreliable. First priority is an immediate copy of irreplaceable data — if the system still boots, copy important files to external media or clone the disk sector-by-sector to a spare drive. If the drive is flaky, use an imaging tool that retries bad sectors (examples: ddrescue or a disk-cloning utility) so a partial rescue is possible.

Quick diagnostics and next steps that weren't covered above:

  • Physically inspect and reseat or replace the IDE ribbon and the Molex power lead. Intermittent detection after moving is often a loose cable or bad power connector.
  • Try the suspect drive alone on the primary cable as master so the BIOS sees it first. That removes master/slave conflicts and isolates the problem.
  • Run an extended/self-test and read SMART attributes (look specifically at Reallocated_Sector_Count, Current_Pending_Sector, and Offline_Uncorrectable). Rising reallocated or pending counts are a strong sign of deteriorating media.
  • If the drive shows transient detection or lots of retries, do not trust it for long-term use — plan to replace it even if it appears to work.

If you get "NTLDR is missing" after a move, that can be either the drive not being seen at boot or a corrupted boot record. From a Windows XP Recovery Console, these commands often help:

fixboot
fixmbr
bootcfg /rebuild

Cautions: do not disable SMART in BIOS as a long-term fix — that only hides warnings. Update BIOS or drive firmware only after data is backed up. If the disk is under warranty, contact the vendor for RMA; otherwise replace the drive and restore from the clone/backup.

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Member Avatar for DMR

What you describe could certainly be the early warning signs of a dying drive. Both Maxtor and Western Digital have diagnostic utilities available which will test the integrity of their drives; if you want to get a more definitive idea of the health of your drives, you should download and run those utilities. Here are the links to the utilities:

Maxtor's "PowerMax" utility:
Bootable floppy disk version
Bootable CD-ROM version

Western Digital's "Data Lifeguard" utility


.

Member Avatar for Lancenova

I tested the drive using the utilities and the S.M.A.R.T. command failed, but as I said, my computer doesn't seem to be experiencing any real problems only the occasional error on bootup when I transfer it from site to site. So I'll keep that in mind and buy myself a backup for it in the event that the drive should fail.

So thanks for the prompt reply. I'll be sure to use this forum again (and read the forum rules just for the wombat person, love those lil creatures) and hopefully it won't be too soon as I hope to keep a functioning computer as long as I can.

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