> There is a way to test hard drives for possible failures or foresee those errors?
Try www.Spinrite.com for drive testing and data recovery. If all is lost, you can wipe the disk with BCWipe (www.jetico.com) then test again with Spinrite. This has recovered several disks for me. SMART is close to useless because each vendor implements it differently. Drive temp is about the only common useful stat from SMART.
