Hard drive dilemma

[Panama Red]

Posted some of this info a while back, but here's the deal.
Have an 80Gb, 2mb buffer Western Digital hard drive that showed a S.M.A.R.T. failure in someone else's computer. They had it replaced under warranty and gave the failed one to me. When I first installed it as a slave in an XP machine and checked it with Partition Magic, it showed "bad". I then checked it with Data Lifeguard at the WD web site. It checked out ok. Tried formatting with XP's Disk Managment and it worked fine. When it was done, it was identified as "healthy" and even Partition Magic said it was ok. Then I tried it in my new build just to test the new machine POST. After it ran the system test, I got a S.M.A.R.T. failure notification. Not sure if there's a cure for this or not. Sent an email to WD asking for an answer yesterday. Anyone got any ideas? I can't send it back for warranty because the sn is not returnable directly to WD.

[glc]

Question
What is S.M.A.R.T. and S.M.A.R.T. failure?

Answer
S.M.A.R.T. is an acronym Self Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology. It is used to perform a quick analysis of the hard drive for problems during system boot up. It does not fix the problems. If a problem is encountered, you can use Data Lifeguard Tools 10 to perform a more detailed analysis of the hard drive. All WD EIDE drives are compatible with S.M.A.R.T. version 2.0.

Older versions of S.M.A.R.T. in the BIOS may cause problems in your hard drive. If you have an older version of S.M.A.R.T. in the BIOS and it reports problems with your drive, you can disable it within the BIOS or contact the BIOS manufacturer for an updated BIOS revision.

[Panama Red]

Saw that at WD site, glc, but this is a drive made March '03 and a brand new P4P800 Deluxe mobo. Can there still be some bios conflict? Coincidently, both mobo's reporting the smart failure are 865 chipsets. Troubling part is that Data Lifequard reports no errors.

[Blue_Gundam2002]

Have you tried the "tough love" methode? It solves about 85% of all hardware realted problems. You just take the item and hit it couple times. If that desn't work I recomend a 22 j/k.

[Panama Red]

I'm familiar with the method, BG. Witnessed it live many times in my drag racing days. It is/was a common method employed by Ford racers! Us Chevy guys never needed to carry a "Ford wrench".

[Panama Red]

Here's an Update: WD tech supported pointed me to the new Data Lifeguard tools and diagnostics now on the web site. I downloaded the diagnostics and ran the Extensive Test. Both the S.M.A.R.T. test and extensive tests came up PASSED. Used the WD tool to Write Zeros to the drive. When I pushed "start" a warning notice came up saying there was a partition on the hdd and all data would be lost. Disk Management wasn't showing any partitions, so I suspect it was something left from the HP rescue partition that was originally on this drive. All this was done with this drive installed as a slave on one of my XP machines. Then partitioned and formatted with Partition Magic and now I'm ready to swap it to this machine using Norton Ghost to transfer my 98se stuff off one of the 80jb drives in here. That'll give me one 80jb for the new machine I'm putting together.

[glc]

Hindsight is wonderful - it might be a good idea to zero out any hard drive that's been in another computer before repartitioning it for reuse. Takes time, but you know it will be fresh when you are done. Proprietary bios and restore partitions can drive you nuts if you put the drive into a generic machine.