On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 5:10 PM, Lanny Marcus <lmmailinglists at gmail.com> wrote: > My wife's box has a very intermittent problem, when booting from the > Maxtor IDE hard drive. This has been going on for about 2 1/2 > years.... The box is a Compaq EVO D300v for the Enterprise. When it > boots, there is a SMART advisory from the BIOS that says failure is > immenient. Occasionally, it will not boot, because the BIOS does not > see the hard drive. I replaced the EIDE cable, but the problem of After I posted this yesterday, I turned my wife loose on her computer and it choked. Possibly a coincidence, after receiving SMART warnings for a couple of years, and it was ready to die. Thought I had 2 used hard drives, in perfect condition, but the first one I installed turned out to be DOA and now the other one is installed.. :-) Thanks to everyone who replied. As Mark (MHR) wrote, I too was skeptical of the SMART warnings from the BIOS and when I checked on the Compaq Support site, a couple of years ago, I was told the Compaq BIOS is very sensitive and there are a lot of false warnings. However, after checking the bad hard drive with smartctl yesterday, I am a believer in SMART warnings....