[ecko]

hello i seem to be having a problem with my hard drive..when the computer boots it says 'major hard disk S.M.A.R.T. BAD sector'. i have run scandisk a few times on both partician drives but still the same error keeps appearing when i boot the computer. Any help on how i would go about fixing this?? thankyou.

[Wolfeymole]

Are you running 98 ecko or XP?

[ecko]

i am running XP...

[Wolfeymole]

Scandisk is only good for 98 and won't work on XP mate.

Instead go to Command Prompt in Accesories and type;

chkdsk c:

You will have to reboot to run it.

Come back with the result.

[ecko]

okay thanks for your advise...will definately come back..

[ecko]

i have just finished the the results said there are 0 kb in bad sectors....i also did not need to reboot the computer before and after. is this correct?

[Wolfeymole]

My apologies Ecko, that would only give you a base reading.

First go into the bios and disable SMART then go back to command prompt and type;

chkdsk c:/f

It will say the drive is locked and do you want to run chkdsk on boot up.

[ecko]

how would i be able to go into the bios to disable SMART?

[Wolfeymole]

When the pc first boots up look for a message that says something along the lines of;
"Press F2 to Enter Setup"

F2 is only an example, it may be Del (Delete) or F12 depending on the PC.

Have a look here too for your machine.

http://www.thecomputerforums.co.uk/f...ess-bios-3997/

[ecko]

right i have disable SMART and when i rebooted the computer the error message of 'bad sector' has gone, however when i run the command prompt and enter chkdsk c:/f i get a message saying 'Chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another process. Would you like this volume to be checked the next time the system restarts?' i selected yes and then rebooted my computer however, nothing seemed to happen so i tried running the command promt once again and this same message appears again. any ideas please??

[Wolfeymole]

Have patience ecko and try again.
It may take a minute to initialise, just let it be.

[ecko]

okay so i have completed the chkdsk on boot up. the computer runs as normal. what do i do now? do i enable SMART again? what do i do if i reveive the same 'bad sector' error?

[Wolfeymole]

SMART can be misleading a lot of times.

Don't re-enable SMART

If you receive another bad disk error then you have problems, I would recommend that you back up any files you need to cdrom now.

[ecko]

okay thanks for all your help. i do not seem to have any problems no more. im just a little curious of why i should not re-enable SMART??

[Wolfeymole]

Windows will tell you if you have a problem with your hard drive, SMART is just a small drain on you system resources to put it in a nutshell.