From: Lanny Marcus <lmmailinglists at gmail.com> > 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.... >From what I understand, there is a "max number of errors allowed" before the warnings appear. This max number is "arbitrary" I guess. In the past, HP bioses had this max number apparently set too low. With firmware updates, the max was raised. So, while you were warned too early, your disk finaly reached the "real" max. JD