Hard disk failure error on SMART status. how can i fix it?

Question

i am running ubuntu on my pc. i am receiving hard disk failure error on SMART status. how can i fix it? thanks.

Answer 1

As I answered a while ago, you can check the SMART status of a disk through Disk Utility... But that's really only a tiny portion of the story.

Your disk is failing a test. Some of the SMART tests aren't too important but you need to check which it is. If it's one of the following, back up, buy another disk, and move everything off and bin the current disk.

• Read Error Rate
• Reallocated Sectors Count
• Spin Retry Count
• End-to-End error
• Command Timeout
• Reallocation Event Count
• Current Pending Sector Count
• Uncorrectable Sector Count
• Soft Read Error Rate

It sounds dramatic but if one of those values is beyond its threshold, your drive has a real possibility of suffering some sort of critical failure in the near future. Acting as soon as possible may save you a sudden and rude interruption when you need the drive in the future and it fails.

Answer 2

This may be a critical situation, so:

1. Backup your data (and the system as well if you need)
2. Run an utility to check the hard disk (see below).

Check the disk:

$ su -
# cd /
# touch /forcefsck
# reboot

or

# shutdown -rF now

Graphical Interface

Ubuntu Main Menu -> System -> Administration -> Disk Utility

The application has Disk drives in left pane and Status of the drive in right pane. You can find SMART status also there with its status indicating with Green/Red light indication.

• Click the SMART Data button below the status, so that you can see the details of the problem
• Click "Run self-test" button and choose the extended one (in the middle normally).
• The take a look on the result and come back here in the case.

Answer 3

SMART stands for Self-monitoring analysis and reporting tool. It's a system which monitors your drive and Ubuntu is able to read certain values and thresholds, so it can warn you of imminent hard-drive failure.

You can view SMART data in Ubuntu here:

System > Administration > Disk Utility > (select your hard-drive)

Values which exceed the expected threshold will be shown in red - you could post them back here for more info, but generally you should perform a backup of the whole drive (or at least the files which are relevant to you) to an external drive, a different computer or a cloud-based storage service like Ubuntu One.