Is this disk trustworthy

[Dennis Gordon]

A colleague's 3 year old Dell started having problems a few months back. the "OS not found..." unable to boot variety. It would happen intermittently. He replaced it and I took the old one to pass on to an intern. I deleted the main partition and reformatted and resinstalled the OS. Ran chkdsk a few times; it showed a small area of damage, but otherwise OK. The machine is up and running fine except on every boot I get a message like "...Dell diagnostics shows that EIDE Drive 0 is operating outside of normal parameters... back up and replace the drive...." etc. I press F1 to continue and everything loads fine.
Is this error a symptom of imminent failure or is it just reacting to the munged area of the drive? Since this isn't a critical machine, I'd just as soon let it be, give it to an intern, since most data is saved over the network, and see what happens. But I figured someone here might be more savvy to the importance of the Dell diagnostics warning. If it continues to run stable for a coupla weeks, can I presume that the drive is essentially trustworthy?

 

[Rocco123]

I think you answered your own question here. If a disk utility reports a disk as degraded, failing, or damaged, I would not trust this disk to keep data whatsoever.

 

[Dennis Gordon]

Well the reason I asked is that I don't trust the Dell utility, presuming it just wants me to buy another hard drive. I have a few other comparable drives lying about, so I'll swap one in I guess..

 

[Rocco123]

Well the reason I asked is that I don't trust the Dell utility, presuming it just wants me to buy another hard drive. I have a few other comparable drives lying about, so I'll swap one in I guess..

Well, past experience with this drive should clue you into the fact that the dell utility isn't "lying". You said previously that the drive was not bootable, and checkdisk also reported issues.

I use Openmanage on a daily basis, and I trust it thoroughly for hardware alerts. They don't make this software to get you to buy replacement parts. If anything, it would cost THEM money for replacing parts that aren't bad.

 

[DougLite]

Even a brand new drive that is 100% SMART sound is not trustworthy.

Backup, backup, backup. Always.

 

[Dennis Gordon]

I agree with you, but since this is a non-critical machine to be used for clerical work, and is running far better than many of the spyware compromised pieces of junk that some of the admin assts. live with on a daily basis, there isn't much risk in letting it go and see what happens. If it craps out, so be it. I've worked with machines before that developed a few bad sectors, were repaired, and went on to work just fine for a long time. I'm more curious and lazy than anything...

 

[Lamont Cranston]

I used to have an IBM Deathstar, wait i mean Deskstar, and occasionally the motor in it would stop spinning the platters. If i rebooted it would work fine for another few weeks at a time....I used it that way for almost 9 months before i broke down and bought a replacement. The only real pressing issue is, how critical is the data on that drive and will you be totally pissed when it dies?

If the risk is low, i say use 'er til she pukes

 

[Dennis Gordon]

I used to have an IBM Deathstar, wait i mean Deskstar, and occasionally the motor in it would stop spinning the platters. If i rebooted it would work fine for another few weeks at a time....I used it that way for almost 9 months before i broke down and bought a replacement. The only real pressing issue is, how critical is the data on that drive and will you be totally pissed when it dies?

If the risk is low, i say use 'er til she pukes

That's my goal...;-)

I ran a 120G RAID on an Asus board that would periodically die, causing me to open the case and smack it a bit until it worked. The first few times was traumatic; after that I just got used to it and ran with the occasional outage for 4 years. Never lost anything. This machine, like I said, has far less important stuff on it...