My fiance's PC has been giving us a boot up error lately. It gives us a "Primary HDD SMART status BAD, replace". The problem is, it's only giving it to us on one hard drive, and we have two. It always skips the Primary slave and goes straight to the CD and DVD rom, (which are fine). In the BIOS, it will not pick up the secondary drive either. I ran some trail and error. Thinking it might have been a dying IDE cable, I replaced the ones on the Secondary connector, and vice versa. That gave me the same issues. So, I took the main hard drive, and connected to my PC, and it booted up just fine. No issues. Disconnect and put back into my fiance's PC, and we get the same error again. Cut to about 40 minutes later, we try to reboot her PC, and voila, no issues! Works perfectly. I start downloading some HDD monitoring software, (namely, Active SMART), and it reads all signs are good. Temperatures are fine, performance on the (slightly) older HDD is fine, the (comparatively) newer HDD is performing even better. Okay... so we figure it's the motherboard and a bad IDE connector. After shutting down and trying again, it starts giving us the error again. This time it's on BOTH the hard drives. I shut down, reboot, same thing. Shut down again, reboot, now it's back to just detecting the Primary Master drive, the Slave does not exist. Okay, so I switch the cables of the HDDs from Primary to Secondary, and the CD and DVD Rom drives to Primary. Nope, same issue, but again, only picking up the first HDD, not the second. I go into the BIOS, sure enough, it's the same, just on Secondary. I try to boot through, and it takes me to the WinXP start up, and slowly boots, (I smacked the side of the HDD bay, don't know if that helped...). So XP boots, and immediately Active SMART gives us a "CRITICAL ERRORS, FAILURE IS IMMINENT!" ... on both. How the hell could two hard drives of fairly the same age be dying at the same frikkin' time? Here's the thing, we are currently backing up a bunch of files (just in case), reading through both drives, with absolutely no issues, no slow down. She's playing MP3s and MIDIs with no issues whatsoever, copying gigs worth across the network to my hard drive as a backup... My mind is made up that it's the freakin' motherboard. I've read through other threads here and some people say it could be jumper settings? I don't see how since they haven't been touched in, oh, forever since the install? It's driving me insane. HDD: Samsung SP0802N 80.1 GB, both of them. Any insight would be nice. Thanks.

Run Samsung hard drive diagnostic program: http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm... Disable Smart Drive annoying messages in bios. Boot up problems and numerous Windows reinstall would be signs of hard drive going bad. Make sure you are using a 80 pins IDE cable.One end to HD is blue(Master) and the other one is grey(Slave).

Yep. I'll run the diagnostic, but I just tried sticking the drives on the other PC and they started crapping out on that PC as well... great. Signs are pointing to bad. Anyone know what could possibly CAUSE these things to die out at the EXACT same time?! One of them is almost a year newer than the other one, got them in 05. I mean... really, what?

Just a strike of bad lot...A new drive with a large cache(8 or 16 MB) should give a welcome boost to your computer overall speed.I would go for a Seagate or Western Digital(OEM or Box).OEM HD is more affordable.Check if you can go over the 137 GB limit with the motherboard bios you have.

On a similar vein I have a brand new Samsung HD400LJ that was only installed 1 week ago and has suddenly started giving the imminent failure message. Can SMART always be relied upon to correctly report? Keep Music Live