SMART Message On Boot

[Sparky]

My Mom's computer got this message on boot with a black screen with white text. Problem is, she has SATA HD, only thing on IDE channel is CD/DVD drive.

IDE Channel O Master Hard Disk S.M.A.R.T. Status Bad.

WARNING: Immediate back up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent.

Is this really the SATA HD failing or any ideas what's going on here? I'm going to go over to her house today and replace the HD, but the message has me a bit confused.

[dicecca112]

There is a counter that SMART keeps track of, probably in this case failed reads or writes. Depending on how often the drive is accessed it could fail today or a year from today, either way back up the info.

[Sparky]

Thanks dicecca112. I am somewhat familiar with SMART but what threw me was the mention of IDE in the warning since it is a SATA drive. Going to head over to Frys this morning and pick up a new drive and go over to Mom's and install it. Hopefully I'll be able to copy everything over to the new drive and not have to do a clean installation.

[dicecca112]

Yeah it did the same thing to me the first time at work, seeing we have SCSI and SAS Drives, but the SMART people were just too lazy to update the message.

[Zertz]

I've had this message for 3-4 months now on one of my drives, it's still doing great :o

[DMB2000uk]

Just make sure you haven't got anything on there you can't risk losing!

Dan