SMART monitors for Vista?

[uberlad]

Vista has been scaring me the last few days by assuring me every few hours that my C:\ drive is about to fail and that I should back it all up immediatey. It claims to have got a SMART failure message but refuses to elaborate.

My c:\ drive is less than four months old and whilst I know that this doesn't preculde the possiblity that it is on the way out it does make it less likely.

Running a Boot Disc based SMART monitoring tool turned up no errors whilst the drive was scanned, but I have backed up all the recorded TV and torrent files just in case.

Anyone know of a SMART monitor that will run ok in Vista? I looked and could find none that claimed to properly support Vista.

Uberlad

[Admiral]

Maybe not the solution you want, but I always disable SMART monitoring in the bios just to avoid these kind of issues, not to mention BSOD's with some previous motherboards I had.

[uberlad]

Yeah, that's the alternative - presume that Vista is lying and stop it checking.

If I can find a decent monitor to run for a couple of weeks and nothing comes up then I'll probabaly do this in the BIOS.

Of course it could just be Vista reading the PATA drive errors and deciding that it's the C:\ drive because it's drive 0. In which case it would be a bug and I'm sure Microsoft would love to help me fix it.

Uberlad

[MultimediaMan]

Speed Fan

Speed Fan (currently at v4.32) has a S.M.A.R.T. reporting tool which can at least tell you what the hubub is about.

S.M.A.R.T. is nowhere near a 100% thing; some drive manufacturers implementations are weird (Seagates are the most consistent, IME), and some BIOS report S.MA.R.T. errors differently than others (it is usually Southbridge chipset-dependant).

[uberlad]

Well. Smart Fan has worked a treat.

Turns out that my C:\ drive has over 3000 reallocated sectors, suggesting that it does have a serious problem. Windows was right (!)

Bet I can't get an RMA or anything until the drive fails

Uberlad

[Technoid]

Well. Smart Fan has worked a treat.

Turns out that my C:\ drive has over 3000 reallocated sectors, suggesting that it does have a serious problem. Windows was right (!)

Bet I can't get an RMA or anything until the drive fails

Uberlad

I've RMA'd drives that had reallocated sectors without problem.

Usually the drive manufactors (Seagate, wd, Hitachi) diagnostic program regards reallocations as drive error and gives you a return code.

[uberlad]

That's a relief.

I'll leave their drive scanning tool running over night and hopefully can get an RMA on monday.

Of course it has to be the system drive that has gone - I might have to buy another drive to fill in whilst it's being replaced.

Possibly not a Samsung one, though.

Uberlad

[uberlad]

Wow. they have an automatic RMA site (www.rexo.co.uk) and all I need to do is get the drive cloned and posted off to them.

Jolly good.

Uberlad

[uberlad]

Now that the RMA is in hand I need to clone the contents of the dodgy drive to a fresh one.

They haven't changed the NTFS enough for Vista to cause all the existing disc copying tools to fail have they? I know that they all stopped working when XP came on the scene.

Does the UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD) contain something that will do it?

Uberlad

[uberlad]

Urgh I wish I had never installed Vista on a machine with multiple drives in.

In its infinite wisdom the installer decided to stick the boot partition on my tiny IDE drive, despite the fact that I installed Windows on the large SATA drive next down the drive chain.

It took quite a while to convince Vista to boot off the SATA drive but I finally got it to do so.

Then I had to try and do the actual task I had the box open for - cloning the wonky SATA drive onto the new IDE drive so that I could RMA it.

I tried Acronis, which consistently switched the machine off at 31% of clone. In the end I found a drive cloner on the Ultimate Boot CD that _seems_ to have done the job. I needed to activate the clone partition, and then use the Vista install DVD to 'repair' the boot information.

Now Vista boots and almost gets to the desktop. Unfortunately it just sits there just before initialising Aero - I fear that one of the critical windows files has finally become corrupted on the dodgy drive and has cloned itself onto the new drive.

Does Vista do a repair install like XP did? Copying across all the files from the install media over any damaged ones, but leaving most of the configuration data standing?

Uberlad

[uberlad]

Just for completeness's sake - Paragon drive backup cloned the driver perfectly (despite the bloomin thing going into S3 sleep halfway through the operation) and I'm posting off the RMA today.

Uberlad