SMART errors - are they for real? or, BIOS weirdness?

[Thufir]

I'm getting SMART errors, but I'm not sure how much credence to give 
them.  It seems to be the same two e-mails over and over.

I recently had to bring the pc to the shop because it wouldn't power on.  
I thought that the power supply had failed, but the guy did something to 
the BIOS.  I don't have the hardware details at the moment, but could the 
error be more of a configuration thing rather than an actual hard drive 
thing?

One of the e-mail's:


  PINE 4.64   MESSAGE 
TEXT                                                    Folder: INBOX  
Message 51 of 57 ALL      

Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 07:51:00 +0100
From: root <root at localhost.localdomain>
To: root at localhost.localdomain
Subject: SMART error (CurrentPendingSector) detected on host: 
localhost.localdomain

This email was generated by the smartd daemon running on:

   host name: localhost.localdomain
  DNS domain: localdomain
  NIS domain: (none)

The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon:

Device: /dev/hdb, 2 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors

For details see host's SYSLOG (default: /var/log/messages).

You can also use the smartctl utility for further investigation.
No additional email messages about this problem will be sent.





Thanks,

Thufir