SMART again

Hardware
1

This is a follow up to a previous post of mine from a while back.

Needless to say, I had a HDD that in Windows was throwing SMART errors left right and center. But in any tool I use in Linux, they say there is nothing wrong with the drive. Even Linux's own drive tool doesn't pick up smart errors, and there is very little bad sectors on this disk.

Ok, so I lived with it and just made it my Linux OS drive. All is fine and dandy.

But now Windows is saying TWO MORE of my drives are having SMART errors. Including it's own OS drive.

So I dragged off of my info I needed and formatted the drive. Grabbed a fresh copy of the newest insider preview of Windows and started the install on a separate drive.

But windows won't install on that drive, nor any other drive I put in its place. I've ripped out my Linux drive just to be sure it's now Linux screwing with something. I've reset the bios and everything. Windows refuses to install on anything other than my SSD that Linux is on now.

Why is Windows doing this? I've checked the setup logs on the USB and it's saying EVERY drive I've put into it is throwing smart errors.

What can I do?

2

if you can still boot into linux then i would reccomend you use dd to write zeros over the entire drive. Dont do this if it is a SSD.

open up a terminal and type

sudo fdisk -l

/dev/sda is most likely going to be your linux drive
/dev/sdb, /dev/sdc, etc is going to be your other drives.

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb

replace /dev/sdb with whatever your drive is called

this will overwirte your entire drive with zeros and hopefully update smart and let it know where the bad sectors

3

Do you have any info on what the errors being reported in windows are/were? Can a tool give you any details?
I wonder if it is driver related, maybe the sata controller is shutting down or disconnecting / reconnecting drives. Perhaps a power management thing.

The smart tool for linux is awesome, so much info. Get it to run a long test on the drives, see what the results are.

You did mention for drive has only a few errors on it!
Also might be worth checking for firmware updates for your drives if they are SSDs if you are going to reformat them.

4

Got any spare SATA cables? You might want to check the drives with one of those first.

5

Excellent suggestions guys. I'm going to a friend's this weekend and will be bringing my PC. Will let you guys know EACTLY what works or doesn't work for me.

Thank you! And keep the suggestions coming!

It's not throwing specific errors which is weird. In the Windows setup log, it's saying there are SMART errors and that drives are gonna fail soon. But it's not giving me specific errors.

6

Grab a copy of CrystalDiskInfo, just be sure to uncheck the adware when installing it, or grab the portable version.

It will report all the smart parameters, so i guess you can google from there what they mean.