SMART Disk Failure – How to Handle Imminent Damaged Blocks

SMART is notorious for not catching hard disk failures ahead of time; you've gotten lucky. If HDS isn't reporting a problem, well, I wouldn't trust it. If SMART values have gotten so bad the BIOS is nagging you about it, that drive is about to crash and burn.

Repairing a hard drive yourself is pretty much impossible. Merely opening the drive would unavoidably expose the internals to dust particles that will destroy the heads and platters in short order. Replacement is the only option -- and on most laptops, replacing the hard drive is rather easy. Usually they're tucked beneath an access panel dedicated to the purpose, that comes out with a screw or two. Keep in mind you'll have to then install your OS and programs onto the new hard drive, and migrate your data over from your backup.

The SMART counters measure the physical/electrical performance of the disk. They're supposed to alert you when the disk is about to experience a failure (or, in your case, already has).

1. You ask if there anything you can do except replace the disk. No, it's a hardware failure. You could replace whatever components have failed (best case that'd mean soldering new components to the control board on the bottom of the drive), but that's not really practical.

2. You ask if you can modify the SMART values. They're not intended to be edited, and doing so wouldn't be useful. The value is just an indicator, changing it won't make it work any better. You could in theory upload a new firmware to the drive to report a lower value (again, in theory, this is not an easy approach). Some drives also have serial (as in "serial port") interfaces, though normally soldering is required, and you might be able to manipulate the values through that interface.

Seagate purchased Samsung's hard drive business, so you can check if its still under warranty with the Seagate Warranty Validation page.