For the first time in my life I saw S.M.A.R.T. in action. Both the BIOS and Windows reported that an issue was detected with a hard disk and that failure could occur.

The Windows Event log didn’t show any hard disk read errors yet, so cloning the disk would have a high chance of success.

I’ve seen disks fail all the time, so nothing new there. But I’ve never seen the S.M.A.R.T. system warn up-front so a replacement is possible without losing any data.

So I added a new disk, did a clone of the drive. Updated the MBR on the new disk, removed the old disk, update BIOS and good to go with a new drive. No unexpected down time, or even worse… data loss.

I didn’t take the time to look what exact S.M.A.R.T. parameter triggered the error.