Received SMART hard disk error (301), what's next?

[intromission]

Hi folks,

My dog accidentally knocked the laptop off the couch a few days ago while it was on.
When I went to use it the next day, everything seemed a little bit slower, and I was getting
freezes and spinning beach balls. Without thinking I ran Disk repair from Disk Utility, not
remembering I have to boot from my Lion thumb drive to do this. Of course all my settings for Lion
were deleted so I reinstalled all my system definitions last night and everything seemed to be working just fine
after that. Well, this morning I got that error from the Windows portion of the system, SMART, error 301. It
went on to boot into Lion just fine and everything still seems to be working as it always did, though the web seems
to hang more often.

I've read online that some Windows users experience this issue and it can be a false flag or something,
not requiring a new hard drive, but I'm guessing that's in my future. What's the best course of action at this point?
Carbon Copy Cloner on everything and then reinstall Snow Leopard->upgrade to Lion on new hard drive?

Didn't see too many mentions of this error on these forums but I'm hoping someone has some suggestions.
If anything I guess I can upgrade/max out the hard drive, it's still on the original.


Thanks.

 

[RehabMan]

Hi folks,

My dog accidentally knocked the laptop off the couch a few days ago while it was on.
When I went to use it the next day, everything seemed a little bit slower, and I was getting
freezes and spinning beach balls. Without thinking I ran Disk repair from Disk Utility, not
remembering I have to boot from my Lion thumb drive to do this. Of course all my settings for Lion
were deleted so I reinstalled all my system definitions last night and everything seemed to be working just fine
after that. Well, this morning I got that error from the Windows portion of the system, SMART, error 301. It
went on to boot into Lion just fine and everything still seems to be working as it always did, though the web seems
to hang more often.

I've read online that some Windows users experience this issue and it can be a false flag or something,
not requiring a new hard drive, but I'm guessing that's in my future. What's the best course of action at this point?
Carbon Copy Cloner on everything and then reinstall Snow Leopard->upgrade to Lion on new hard drive?

Didn't see too many mentions of this error on these forums but I'm hoping someone has some suggestions.
If anything I guess I can upgrade/max out the hard drive, it's still on the original.


Thanks.

Seems likely your HDD is damaged and needs replacement.
Consider an SSD.