The SMARTer your Hard Disks, the Healthier they are

Recently, about a month back if I remember right, I suffered from my first HDD crash. My Linux partition crashed and since that was were my boot loader was, my PC promptly went down. It took me about 2 days to get my Windows partition back up and running but the damage was done. I had just upgraded my Ubuntu from 6.06 to 6.10 to 7.04 and all that effort was lost. Additionally around 25 gigs of data just went down the drain. The problem was a physical crash and it would cost me more to recover the data than to get myself a couple more Hard Disks.

So, how did it all start? The first hint came to me when my PC booted up one day and I got an error on the screen saying S.M.A.R.T. returned a status error. S.M.A.R.T. stands for Self Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology. In case you don't know what that is then you must go into your BIOS the next time you reboot and have a look at the option. And in case it isn't activated, I highly recommend that you turn it on immediately. A boot up time loss of 1 second isn't anything when compared to the hours that you would need to spend to recover data lost due to a crash.

Back to how the problem started. It was just another evening when I switched on my PC after returning home from work. After the POST checks, the SMART check flashed a warning saying that an error was found in the HDD and I should back up all data and replace the disk. I didnt really bother about it (which would later turn out to be my biggest mistake) and carried on with the boot. Further reboots over the next few days didnt throw any error and I had soon forgotten about the problem. Then again one day I got the same error. From my past experience, I didn't care about the error thinking that it will go away soon and was just a minor issue that threw the error. The system also threw an error about being unable to boot into GRUB (the linux boot loader). I thought it was a connection problem and I unplugged and plugged back the HDD cables inside the cabinet. A few more days passed and suddenly my system refused to boot up upon a power-on. I tried to check what the problem was and then I realized, to my shock, that the HDD wasn't being detected in the BIOS.

I realized that this was why the GRUB wasn't booting the previous time the error occurred. The BIOS wasn't detecting the HDD though it was plugged in. I had a flashback and I remembered the SMART warning that I got the week before. I hoped and prayed for just one chance that the HDD would work so that I could back up all the data from it but that hope never saw the light of the day. My HDD was gone and so did all the data that I had carefully downloaded and accumulated on it. I realized my follies and decided never to ignore any warning message that comes up in the BIOS or elsewhere.

From my experience, I just have one advice for your download freaks who have gigs of data on your HDD and have everything to lose in case of a crash - Play it safe, Play it S.M.A.R.T.