I have had a SMART failure bootup warning on my hard drive for some weeks. The drive works fine, I have since reformatted and repartitioned it and it works without fault. Is this 'failure' prediction ALWAYS an indication of a hardware problem with a drive or can I ignore it? I also don't understand why it shows when SMART feature is disabled on all my drives in the BIOS! How can I turn it off successfully???

That usually indicates there is some bad sectors on the hardrive and it eventually will fail. Most hardrives have a 3 year warrantee. Just go to the Manufacturer's website and download the software to test it for the error code. Maxtor and Western Digital supply that on their sites and once you give the error code they replace it for you.

Thanks Robbie. I have since run Maxtor's diagnostic tool and it passed all the tests on a full scan. The only failure was a "SMART attribute" test. It showed no errors with bad sectors and seemed to look healthy. Should I still regard it as a dying drive or could it be a SMART failure report that is generated in error? (perhaps it still shows since the drive was repartitioned and reformatted?)

Are you getting this warning from Windows or from the BIOS. If it is Windows reporting the failure then you are receiving the warning BECAUSE you have disabled it in the BIOS. Windows is expecting the SMART report to be passed to it and reports a fault because it is not receiving the expected data. Turn reporting back on in the BIOS and see if it persists.

The SMART failure warning is from the BIOS on bootup. I turned the SMART on and OFF again but weirdly it still shows up on boot. There doesn't seem to be a way to disable the SMART warning from showing up every time :(