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My computer recently presented me with a possibility that my hard drive is about to fail. On further investigation I found out that it was a S.M.A.R.T. status failure. I've got a WD hard drive, so I went and got their WE Diagnostics Tool. It confirmed the S.M.A.R.T. warning, but an extended test passed as you can see in this picture:

enter image description here

I've read a bit about about S.M.A.R.T. and realized that my HDD can fail. This is not my primary computer thought and was recently formated, so it does not contain anything really important. It's a laptop and recently I've mostly used it to watch movies on my TV screen.

With that said I was wondering if I can disable the annoying warning BIOS shows at startup? I've looked in BIOS, but found no settings, it actually had really few settings. The laptop runs some version of Phoenix BIOS.

Oh, and as a side question. If I leave the disk in my laptop and it fails, can it damage any other components?

UPDATE (Jan 11, 2015): If anybody reading this in concern for their drive. After more then 3 years my drive is still doing fine. I haven't used the laptop heavily or about 2 of those years, but for the last few months it's running an Ubuntu-based media server and the drive isn't showing any signs that it might stop working.

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  • 1
    Your disk has just some damaged cells on surface. It won't affect other components.
    – oneat
    Jul 16, 2011 at 11:02
  • The SMART utility you used didn’t display the actual number of reallocated sectors, by the way. Depending on whether the count is low or high a replacement is highly recommended. This attribute is only updated on write, you could still suffer from data loss due to silent corruption.
    – Daniel B
    Jan 11, 2015 at 12:51
  • I might look into it, but the way the server is set up, there is no actual critical data on it. It more or less just runs the server. All media files are on external drives. If this was a more important drive, I would have replaced it immediately after I got the warning.
    – gligoran
    Jan 11, 2015 at 13:39

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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There should be an option called Internal HDD. Go into it and at the very bottom there should be SMART Monitoring option that you can disable.

The good news:

137 Relocated Sector Sector Relocated. There may be repairable media errors on a platter. The automatic repair feature can attempt a repair if possible. You may need to rescan to ensure that the repairs were effective. Replace the drive if the error repeats.

I would recommend grabbing a copy of Hiren's Boot CD and try to repair.

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  • 1) Sadly there is no such option in my BIOS. It's an Acer laptop, so maybe they limited the BIOS, as it doesn't even have the Advanced section. 2) That's really good news. I've downloaded Hiren's BootCD and it looks like a great bundle of stuff. I don't really know which tool to use, so I'm currently running HDAT2. Is that the correct tool for this? Oh, and BTW, where did you find the quoted text?
    – gligoran
    Jul 16, 2011 at 13:58
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    support.wdc.com/techinfo/general/errorcodes.asp for the error codes. It is possible that there is no such option in your bios, so the only option would be to fix the drive. HDAT2 is a good option or you can try Western Digital Data Lifeguard Tools 1.22(also included on the cd) Good luck! :)
    – Marcus Maxwell
    Jul 16, 2011 at 14:18
  • Thanks, I'll try it when HDAT2 is finished. It seems it will be running for a couple of hours. BTW will I still have usable windows on my HDD after HDAT2 is done, or will I have to reinstall?
    – gligoran
    Jul 16, 2011 at 14:22
  • Your windows install should be fine.
    – Marcus Maxwell
    Jul 16, 2011 at 15:19
  • HDAT2 completed its run and found no bad sectors. I ran the WD Tools as well, but I found nothing I can do to repair the S.M.A.R.T. warning. Well I guess I'll just have to learn to live with it. Thanks for your help.
    – gligoran
    Jul 16, 2011 at 15:26

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