SMART testing has been around for a while and isn’t very well understood. I can’t say that I’m an expert on it, but I’ve come to have several fairly well developed ideas in regards to it. First off, if I have a live hard drive that fails to complete a SMART test, it’s time for me to retire that drive. It may seem extravagant, but I would rather not have to spend loads of time recovering data of a potentially failing drive. It’s true that SMART is not necessarily going to raise a red flag before a significant data loss event happens. In fact, I’ve seen drives report that they’ve passed the health test in spite of some serious disk problems. What I think you ought to look out for are a few of these points:
Category: Tech Support Tools
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Checking the SMART details of a hard drive with an Ubuntu Boot CD
S.M.A.R.T. is a self monitoring and reporting tool built into every modern hard drive. Did you know that you can use an ubuntu linux boot cd to check that smart status and run SMART tests on your drive? This is the same boot cd that you can use to test out or install the ubuntu linux environment, but you can do the SMART testing without installing linux on your hard drive.
How?
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Remastering Ubuntu’s live disk
Many times I’ve used Ubuntu’s livecd to test out an ailing system, but more than once I’ve wanted to add a utility, yes you can apt-get install from the live cd, but that assumes the system has a working internet connection, it’s sometimes better to just build the cd yourself with the tools YOU want. Using the tips in this forum thread and this page, with help from this google search, I remastered my own custom version of ubuntu (with smartmontools among other things.) I consider the ability to make your own custom tools priceless when it comes to tech support.