So I've been attempting to fix a friend's HP laptop (model number unknown) for a few days ago. Hard drive errors. My usual idiot self decided that he wouldn't make SMART testing the first thing he'd do. Anyway, I just got around to SMART testing. I formatted his drive and wrote a new partition table. Ran Ubuntu from a live USB.
Something immediately caught my eye. Now I don't know much about SMART test results, but I know that it's probably not a good thing if the SMART dialog says that the read error rate threshold is 62 and the read error rate value is 1,245,235. Seriously. That's 20,084 times the threshold.
I need at least 10 reputation to post images so I'm just going to post the link to the gallery (I'm not typing out the entire results):
http://postimg.org/gallery/neol4s58/f9d3487e/
On a scale of the Virgin Mary to the Greek economy, how screwed is this hard drive?
badblocks
method(s) don't depend on SMART and should uncover any drive failures.