Hey. Nasty problem. I recently took a Maxtor 60GB HD out of one machine and put it in as the primary slave in another. Now when I boot the BIOS detects the drive fine, but gives a SMART failure error, and tells me to replace the drive. I have run the MAXTOR diagnostic util on it, which also reports a SMART error. SMART monitoring is disabled on the drive, and the motherboard it came out of also supported SMART but there was never a problem. There is no speed or data issues with the drive, so I am thinking there is nothing wrong with the drive, but perhaps an incompatability with the Motherboard. It's an ASUS A7A266-E with an AMD Athlon 1700+. Anyway, I don't really wanna replace the drive unless I have to, but anyone ever heard of this before ??? I have the latest BIOS revision, and the drive seems to be running fine when I F1 past the error and use the drive in WinXP. Ta

The purpose of SMART is to warn you ahead of time that the disk might be failing soon. So you kind of run a gamble by continuing to use it.

s.m.a.r.t actually is firmware that invented inside your hdd to report the hdd conditions. and if your hdd going to fail the error message will be generated.if possible back-up all your data occationally.

yes, there are very small engineers inside your hard drive, working to come up with new and better ideas. I think they are working for Intel.

If smart is enabled on motherboard and your drive has recorded too many errors the system will not cotinue boot. Occurred on a customer drive that was having read errors. When I put it in to another system to do recovery. It wouldn't boot. Just bios message. Get a new drive