A SMART warning from computer is well worth heeding
Q: I am receiving a message telling me I will lose my hard drive if I do not correct. The message says “SMART FAILURE Predict hard drive Toshiba MK 2035Gss Warning: Immediately backup your data and replace your hard disk drive.” Should I be concerned?
A: SMART stands for Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology. It’s a system used by computers to monitor the health of hard-disk drives installed in your PC and is designed to alert you that your drive may be failing.
If you are receiving this error it is a good indication that you have issues with your hard drive.
These issues could be serious enough to consider replacing the hard drive, as it usually points to there being defective sectors on the platters that could lead to a corruption or even loss of data.
You can run some maintenance on your system to identify the bad sectors on the drive and make sure that your data is only stored on healthy portions of your disk drive using the CHKDSK utility.
Also known as Check Disk, CHKDSK scans your hard drive for faulty sectors and moves the data to healthy portions of the disk while blocking off the bad sectors so they are not used in the future.
Instructions for using this tool can be found at tinyurl.com/helplinechkdsk.
Keep in mind that CHKDSK will almost always find corrupted data and clean it up. This does not mean your drive is failing. But if you keep getting SMART alerts, it is likely you are about to experience a serious system failure.
Using CHKDSK after seeing a SMART error may buy you some time, but in my experience once this starts to happen, it is a good bet that it will continue to happen. Hardware does not tend to heal itself. The symptoms may vanish for awhile, but the underlying problem will remain until it is addressed.
As always, I strongly recommend backing up your data regularly to prevent data loss.
Note that SMART is designed to keep you ahead of a hard-drive failure. Address this now and on your timetable rather than waiting for the system to fail and addressing it when it is less convenient.