S.M.A.R.T. Disk Failure

[jwinn3]

I received a notification: "Sec Slave Hard Disk: S.M.A.R.T. Status Bad, Backup And Replace." I'm using Western Digital Enhanced IDE Hard Drive 80Gig (Master) and Western Digital Enhanced IDE Hard Drive 13Gig (Slave) on Windows XP Home, SP2. The only thing I use the Slave Drive for is complete system backup using Acronis. Both drives are formatted using NTFS with S.M.A.R.T. enabled. Could it be that the data is corrupted on the slave causing this error, or is it that the drive is failing and needs replacing as S.M.A.R.T. indicates? I hadn't received this notification until my last backup. Prior to this it was functioning properly. Is it possible to reformat the slave drive to wipe out this possibly corrupted data?

[EzyStvy]

The S.M.A.R.T. is "Self Monitoring And Reporting Technology". It is a standard interface allowing a hard disk drive to check its status, report it to host system, and provide some estimation for a failure date.

It's not the data that is bad, it's the drive itself. Copy the data while you can...

[jwinn3]

Originally Posted by EzyStvy It's not the data that is bad, it's the drive itself. Copy the data while you can...

EzyStvy:
I disconnected the failing slave drive with the complete acronis true image (in addition to a ERUNT registry backup in a separate folder) of my OS still on it. I do plan to purchase another hard drive. But in the meantime if I should have to restore the image from this drive I wonder if I can safely extract the image before it completely fails?

[EzyStvy]

Maybe - Maybe Not. There's no way to tell exactly when it's going to die completely.

[jwinn3]

EzyStvy:

Thanks for your input!