OSXFAQ Mac OS X Tip-of-the-Day 
Trouble-Shooting III (Hardware) - Be SMART
By Adrian Mayo - Editor - OSXFAQ
This week's trouble-shooting considers hardware problems like disc
corruption and faulty memory.
Week 28 February, Trouble Shooting (Applications) considers
trouble-shooting a particular application that is not behaving as it
should.
Week 7 March, Trouble-Shooting II (System) concentrates on
trouble-shooting system problems that affect many applications, or the
system in general.
Week 21 March, Trouble Shooting IV (Advanced) gives some advanced
trouble-shooting tips, mostly involving the terminal and single-user
mode.
The hard disc(*) drive is the most vital component of your Mac.
Everything else is replaceable, but there will be information on the
disc that is probably not. Being a mechanical device it is also the
most likely to fail. Sound backup practices are essential to avoid
inevitable loss of data.
(*) In some locales 'disc' is spelt 'disk'. Here I use the English
form 'disc'.
Check the SMART status of your hard disc drives periodically. A
heavily-used drive, like the system disc, may not last more than 3
years before it starts developing faults. It's prudent to replace the
drive *before* it fails. How does one know a drive is about to fail?
Modern drives use SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting
Technology) which is capable of predicting impending problems.
Open Disc Utility in Applications:Utilities and select a drive (not a
partition) from the left-hand list. The SMART status is shown at the
foot of the window.
'Verified' means all is OK.
'About to fail' in red mean the drive *will* fail soon. Backup then replace it.
Use the Terminal to check the drive status.
$ diskutil info disk0 | grep SMART
SMART Status: Verified
disk0 is the system disc, others are numbered 1 up. This will not work
for non-smart drives like CDs, or devices for which Mac OS X does not
support SMART.
Get detailed SMART information using commercial software such as
TechTool Pro 4:
http://www.micromat.com/tt_pro_4/tt_pro_4.html
Enjoy !! :-)
Panther 10.3.8
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