Failing S.M.A.R.T. status

[fash]

my disk utility says that my hard disk has a "Failing" S.M.A.R.T. status in red letters, is there any way or is it possible to restore it back to normal? can someone explain what it means and is it inevitable that it will fail?

when it fails does it mean it's crashed and is the data recoverable?

what are ur advice? should i back up immediately and about how long of its life has it got do u reckon?

thanks for any help in advanced.

 

[jeremy.king]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Monitoring,_Analysis_and_Reporting_Technology

You may want to backup like you do every week

 

[JDOG_]

Back up all your important data immediately and take it to an Apple Store (if possible) to get it looked at by a Genuis. Alternately you can call Apple...

This is all assuming you have AppleCare. Albeit they probably can't do anything until the HD dies.

 

[CanadaRAM]

is it possible to restore it back to normal?

No

and is it inevitable that it will fail?

Yes

when it fails does it mean it's crashed and is the data recoverable?

Yes, and usually No, in that order.

what are ur advice? should i back up immediately

YES

and about how long of its life has it got do u reckon?

1 minute to 1 month, you never know.

Hate to say this, but why are you spending time posting here when you should be backing it up?!? Get the to a backup, post haste.
If you don't have one already, get yourself an external Firewire drive large enough to clone your internal drive, and also to make regular data backups to.

Once you are backed up you will eather call Applecare if under warranty, or purchase a new hard drive for yourself if not. If you buy a retail Seagate replacement drive from a third party seller, you'll get a 5 year warranty. Others have 3 years - make sure you check the warranty in writing before purchasing - you don't want a 'pull' or an OEM or a 'recertified' drive that has zero to one year warranty.
Hope it all goes well for you.

 

[kevin49093]

Me too...

I had this exact thing happen about two weeks after buying a new mac mini.
It turns out that I had filled the hard drive (I was converting something to DV for school...didn't realize how big it would get!)

After I deleted the files, backed up everything to my server, waited a few days, and then went online to see the hours of the local apple store, it seemed to fix itself... strange.


I heard that full disks can give you errors, but I wonder why it took a few days to reset the S.M.A.R.T. warning?

 

[cemorris]

I had my status bounce back and forth for an entire month. I backed up every day until it finnaly refused to boot properly. That is a nice feature to have. I just wish Apple would have some software that would check the SMART status periodically and pop up some type of warning. It was just by chance that I caught it one day while in disk utility.

 

[jeremy.king]

I had my status bounce back and forth for an entire month. I backed up every day until it finnaly refused to boot properly. That is a nice feature to have. I just wish Apple would have some software that would check the SMART status periodically and pop up some type of warning. It was just by chance that I caught it one day while in disk utility.

Or maybe a widget....hmmmm....I could probably do it.

 

[Makosuke]

I had my status bounce back and forth for an entire month. I backed up every day until it finnaly refused to boot properly. That is a nice feature to have. I just wish Apple would have some software that would check the SMART status periodically and pop up some type of warning. It was just by chance that I caught it one day while in disk utility.

There's a little 3rd party utility that does this, but it's not free. Probably still a good investment, though.

I believe OSX server does log errors, so it's not like the framework isn't in place--Apple really should have something like this standard.

 

[FadeToBlack]

I had my status bounce back and forth for an entire month. I backed up every day until it finnaly refused to boot properly. That is a nice feature to have. I just wish Apple would have some software that would check the SMART status periodically and pop up some type of warning. It was just by chance that I caught it one day while in disk utility.

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/23232