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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?

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  • As far as I remember, the meaning of the values and thresholds of SMART evaluations aren't standardised anywhere, so you pretty much need to rely on the automated assessment in the last column on these pictures. Does the disk make any strange noises when it runs? How do I check the integrity of a storage medium (hard disk or flash drive)? may be of use to you. The badblocks method(s) don't depend on SMART and should uncover any drive failures. Mar 27, 2015 at 2:07

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Read error rate is an index whose value it's meaningful only if interpreted based on a manufacturer's guideline, since there's no standard way to implement it.

Conversely, the Reallocated sector count index is very alarming: 3736544 sectors * 512B = 1913110528B = 1.91GB~, and this means that almost 2GB worth of sectors are gone already.

So, to answer your question, the drive is failing.

Personally, I wouldn't store a single byte worth of important informations on it.

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