Peter Wrote:
>I started getting an intermittent error apparently generated by my BIOS
that tells me one of my drives (not the boot drive) has a SMART failure

If memory serves me correctly, this is not a BIOS generated message.

Neither Norton System Doctor, nor the Maxtor diagnostic program reports any
problem with this drive. Also, the message during boot sometimes occurs for
several boots, and then no messages are seen for a while.

The disk utilities normally will not report a pending failure of a hard
drive. If you ran Spin Doctor you might see the error or possible cause.

"SMART technology is used to monitor disk drive degradation, in an effort to
predict future catastrophic disk failure."

What you are experiencing now is intermittent and to be sure, the SMART disk
utility on the drive may possibly warn you again. I would plan on replacing
the drive as soon as possible to avoid unrecoverable data loss.

Sincerely,

Frank Suszka
netTek Computers
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