Catastrophic disk failure, where was smartd?

[David G. Mackay]

I tried to install Centos 5.1 on a hard drive, and ran into errors
formatting it.  I downloaded and ran the dos version of the Seagate
tools against the disk, which found all sorts of errors, and claimed
that it was running at 253 degrees.  This drive has been sitting idle,
but powered on and mounted in a system running FC6 on a different drive.
Looking at /var/log/messages, I see no smart warnings until after I
rebooted into FC6.  Prior to the failure I see messages indicating that
the drive is in the smartd database, and that it has been added to the
monitor list.

Shouldn't there have been some indication of problems prior to the
failure?

Dave