Why is norton utilities giving a SMART sensor alert?

I have the Norton Utillities program installed on my system, I currently get a pop up box telling me alert physical disk errors detected on drive c:

I have run the disk scan program and it can find no errors on c drive, but I also get an alert on the smart portion of the sensor. I have added a scanner (umax) could this be causing the problem?

This question was answered on August 22, 1999. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.

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This information was found on web site of Norton, and this informs you about the chances of your hard drive failure are high when you get SMART sensor alerts I would recommend you back up your files and contact your manufacturer for assistance.

SMART is an acronym for Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology It is a feature on most newer drives in which the controller checks the integrity of the disk Drives that implement this new industry-wide standard, when used with host software, can provide a "pre-failure alert" notice to the user when certain threshold conditions are exceeded The objective is to give the user a chance to back up the drive and obtain a replacement before valuable data is lost through a physical drive failure.

SMART hard disk drives monitor their own physical performance, such as spin-up times, re-write tries, seek times, and bad sectors Extensive research by the drive makers shows that most disk failures are preceded by identifiable signatures Up to 30 separate conditions can be monitored The results of this monitoring are stored on the drive The drives also store a "threshold" value which the drive manufacturers pre-set as the point at which, when exceeded, they believe the drive is highly likely to fail physically.

This sensor is included in System Doctor in NU 95 2.0 and 3.0, and NU NT 2.0 It is a traffic light that indicates that the hard drive is about to fail physically, or that the SMART status of the hard drive is unknown A "fail" message from the SMART sensor indicates a physical problem, and that you should contact the manufacturer of the computer system or the hard drive for assistance and possible replacement.

The sensor light is red and NDD does not find problems This is normal Many of the items monitored by SMART are not checked by NDD or Chkdsk If you run a utility that came with the drive, this may correct the problem If not, drive failure may be imminent

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Posted by Ken Colburn of Data Doctors on August 22, 1999

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