How to Fix It When Your Hard Drive SMART Status Test Failed?

SMART status test failed on my Lenovo laptop!

"I’m a Lenovo laptop owner and recently when I ran a SMART hard drive checkup, everything passed until I got to the last one titled hard drive. The SMART status test failed and it said 'Failed with the following error: status undefined…’I contacted Lenovo and they didn’t fix it. Does anybody know what causes the SMART error for the device is still under warranty if I plan on replacing with a new one."

How to check SMART status for a hard drive?

Hard drives don’t live forever and they’ll die or get damaged one day. So, here comes S.M.A.RT. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) and at least you can do some basic self-monitoring. Unfortunately, Windows doesn’t provide an easy-to-use inbuilt utility to check SMART status and you can only view very basic information about SMART status from the CMD like what I’ve shown below.

To get a literally detailed SMART status, you need to resort to a third-party program utility. Here, I recommend AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard, with which, you can acquire very comprehensive info of your SMART status. For example, you can view which items are equal to or exceed the threshold and what causes smart errors as all problematic items are marked red.

Free download the most powerful SMART status monitor to ensure the health of your hard drive.

Step 1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. After that, the program will automatically obtain the SMART info of all hard drives in the background. When it notices that the health of a certain hard disk is poor, a red exclamation mark will appear on the icon of the problematic hard disk. Now, Click “Properties” in the corner of disk status.

Step 2. There’re 3 sorts of status of your hard disk.

State 1: Good

State 2: Caution

State 3: Bad

Step 3. Hit “View details” to see more specific details about the SMART info. Red texts mean the value of the item is equal to or exceeds the threshold.

However, if the hard drive is an SSD, then, you won’t acquire the detailed info. You’ll only be prompted with a notification as follows.

Under this circumstance, you can turn to another feature "Check Bad Sectors" for help.

How do I fix SMART status failure and other errors

If you find there’s something wrong with your hard drive in terms of the results of the SMART status info, measures should be taken to tackle it before it gets worse.

Way 1. Cool the system unit

When SMART status test failed or there’re other errors with a hard drive, the first thing you’re supposed to try is to cool down the system unit.

1. Check the performance of the coolers.

2. Clean dust.

3. Install an additional cooler for better ventilation.

Way 2. Run anti-virus software

There’re also chances that your PC is under a virus attack that causes errors with SMART status. In this case, running Windows built-in antivirus program Windows Defender or any other third-party app programs should be the best choice.

Way 3. Check the drive for errors

Another way to fix SMART errors is checking your drive for errors.

1. Open "This PC".

2. Right-click on every drive and select “Properties”. Then, go to the "Tools" tab and click on "Check."

Usually, the drives can be fixed if there’re any errors with them.

Way 4. Defrag the hard disk

If the method above doesn’t work, you should try defragging your hard drives.

1. Hit the magnifier icon at the left bottom of the desktop and type "disk defrag" in the search box.

2. Under "Best matches",  select "Defragment and Optimize Drives".

3. Then, in the "Optimize Drives" window, you can choose the drive to optimize or hit "Change settings" to schedule defrag the drives daily, weekly, or monthly.

Move all data from the problematic drive to a new one?

If SMART status test failed or there’re any other errors with the test result, to ensure data security to the most extent, you'd better replace your current hard drive with a new one in case of any incoming disk glitches that crash computer. To avoid any data loss during the disk replacement, AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard provides to clone your current disk to another securely, all files and data including the operating system are included in the course of the data transfer.

Conclusion

What is SMART status test, how to check it, and what to do when SMART status test failed. In this post, a simple but accurate definition of SMART is given and an efficient and easy-to-use third-party app – AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard - is introduced to help check detailed info of SMART status of your hard drive. At last, 4 effective methods to deal with SMART status test failure are provided as well.

Then, if you want to use other features of the AOMEI product mentioned above like SSD 4K alignment and SSD secure erase, you can upgrade the software to its professional edition.