SMART status bad on my HDD but its workin fine and freakin me out...!!

[hellraiser06]

Hi a;;
I have a peculiar problem. At the boot up, bios shows a message which says that the SMART status of my HDD at IDE channel 4 is bad and drive failure may be imminent, replace your hard drive immediately.

I have two Hard disks, one is a 40 GB IDE WD (two partitions) and the other is a 250 GB SATA 1 WD (win xp on 25 gb partition four partitions in all).
The thing is that this warning has been there for a month now and i can work fine on my computer no problem whatsoever. winxp disk check utility and some other third party utilities like o&o dont show any bad sectors at all. Even the WD utility dont show any abnormality.
What should i do before calling the tech support(the sata1 is still in warranty period)????????

 

[hellraiser06]

Oh c'mon guys help me out............

 

[qwertycopter]

SMART is a predictive failure mechanism that works by monitoring certain aspects of hard drive operation such as temperature, bad sectors, CRC errors, etc. It uses certain thresholds to determine if a drive is likely to fail. If you repeatedly pass a threshold, SMART sees this as a high risk and therefore warns you in advance. Your drive is not operating normally, it is passing thresholds and that indicates a problem. Your drive might be working now, but SMART predicts that the MTBF has gone way down and you need to act on it ASAP.

Yes, it's possible for SMART to provide inaccurate results. Yes, your drive could last quite a bit longer. However, if your data isn't backed up this should be a clear sign that it's time to do something about that. Google's study of hard drives showed that SMART predicts about 30% of imminent hard drive failures. Furthermore, drives that had SMART error were 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than those without them.