# How to clear S.M.A.R.T data



## Laurijan (Feb 7, 2008)

Hi!

I got a HDD with bad sectors on it from a friend and was able to repair the drive with hdd-regenerator. 

Because the drive was in use as it had bad sectors the S.M.A.R.T data got messed up. 

How i can reset it or clear it - so that the windows vista installation or startup screen doesnt complain about the drive beeing faulty when smart is enabled in the bios.

Thanks..


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## Namslas90 (Feb 7, 2008)

Try a free S.M.A.R.T. Data "scrubber";

http://www.soft32.com/download_188306.html


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## ktr (Feb 7, 2008)

Or you can just disable S.M.A.R.T. in the bios.


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## Graogrim (Feb 7, 2008)

That data scrubber simply "superdeletes" data by overwriting trashed files to prevent casual data recovery. It won't actually reset SMART information. To be honest I don't know of a way to reset SMART data. It's something that the hard drive maintains internally, and in any event it would be a counterproductive thing to do.

Hard drives ship with spare space for error recovery purposes. Although the process can occur automatically, what recovery tools do is help cue the hard drive to "remap" physically bad sectors to this spare space. Once remapped, when a read or write would otherwise occur to a bad sector, the drive instead automatically and transparently diverts the access to the reserved area, thus hiding the error.

Here's the kicker: this doesn't fix the original problem. The error is still there, the drive is just  working around it. And statistically speaking, the hard drive now has a much shorter life expectancy and probably shouldn't be trusted to hold any crucial information.

That's what this SMART error is telling you. If you want to ignore it, disable SMART in the BIOS. But your best bet is to just get a new hard drive. You're likely in for a lot of hair pulling frustration if you don't.


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