S.M.A.R.T. Failed - Raw read error rate

Hi all,

I was trying to change the size of my partitions on my Macbook Air, but was not able to do so, since the S.M.A.R.T. status failed.

I then downloaded SMART Utility from apple.com, and the only thing I can see, is that the overall SMART test failed. If I click attributes, I see the "Raw Read Error Rate" says "FAILING NOW".

UPDATE: It also says, that it has "Handling damage" ?

What is wrong with my HD, and shoud I be concerned?

Your hard drive is failing, and yes you should be concerned.

Make backups of your data NOW. As in "don't even reply to this message until the backups have been done."

Ok - thank you. I made a backup yesterday when I formated the computer. Do you know what those errors messages mean, and how much will a new HD cost?

It means the drive has some bad blocks that are preventing the computer from reading its contents normally.

Is your MBA under warranty? If so, speak to Apple about a replacement. If not, you may want to replace the drive yourself (mechanically challenging) or pay a technician to do it. I *strongly* recommend using ONLY licensed Apple techs -- PC techs WILL ruin your machine, they know as much about grace and delicate engineering as a tea leaf knows about the history of the East India Company.

A Raw Read Error is basically when the HDD is not able to read or write data to a particular sector on the disk and is usually because of a physical error.

In theory, the drive should just mark the area unsuitable for data storage, but in practice the area that is damaged grows very quickly and it's highly likely you'll experience a complete HDD failure before too long, assuming it's a standard mechanical HDD. If it's an SSD then that could be different.

Is your MBA covered by warranty or Apple Care right now?

Thank you for the reply. No, it is not covered by the warranty. I have some technical skills, and I have seen a video on how to do it - if it fails I will try to replace it myself, unless I can get a pro tech to do it.

Thank you for the reply.

BTW. The disk analasis program said something about 90% remaining.

ChristianMadsen said:

Thank you for the reply. No, it is not covered by the warranty. I have some technical skills, and I have seen a video on how to do it - if it fails I will try to replace it myself, unless I can get a pro tech to do it.

Thank you for the reply.

BTW. The disk analasis program said something about 90% remaining.

Click to expand...

10% of the disk being damaged is huge - usually it would only be a few sectors, or less than 1%. This could be something to do with your partitioning, it might be worth creating a single partition and running the scan again.

The MacBook Air uses the tiny iPod HDD, which are hard to come by now.

Zoolook said:

10% of the disk being damaged is huge - usually it would only be a few sectors, or less than 1%. This could be something to do with your partitioning, it might be worth creating a single partition and running the scan again.

The MacBook Air uses the tiny iPod HDD, which are hard to come by now.

Click to expand...

Thank you for the reply.

The problems is, that I cannot remove or change the partition since the S.M.A.R.T. fails - is there a way to bypass this?

ChristianMadsen said:

Thank you for the reply.

The problems is, that I cannot remove or change the partition since the S.M.A.R.T. fails - is there a way to bypass this?

Click to expand...

On a PC you could disable the SMART in the BIOS. I don't know how to do this on a Mac other than removing it and placing it in a FFirewire enclosure and setting it as the Target drive. SMART will not work on an external drive.