My grandparents were using this semi-old AM2 based computer with a SATA seagate 120 GB STS3120213AS hard drive and the BIOS kept having a POST error that simply warned that hard drive failure was imminent and I need to back up all my data now. It said that many reboots in a row but if you hit F1 it would let you past and boot windows just fine.
So I ran the bootable seagate seatools CD and it reported that the drive's SMART hadn't been tripped and it was working fine. The POST message didn't mention SMART specifically either though. I ran the "long test" in seatolls and it passed. In fact, since I got this computer back to my house, it hasn't given me that message ever. In that time I had unplugged it to connect it with the same SATA cable to another computer to transfer everything off it since my grandparents decided to upgrade to one of my spare Phenom AM2+ quad win 7 systems for a really huge discount
this one's capped a single core AM2 btw cuz it's a crappy A8M2N-LA board. So now it's mine and thus my problem
since I had no problems after that, I ran DBAN and wiped the entire hard drive and that didn't report any problems then reinstalled XP and that went fine. And it passed a chkdsk with 0 bad sectors. So what caused that message? A loose cable or something? And what else would there be but SMART that would trip that? Or does SMART eventually reset?
