Multiple hard disk failures - coincidence ?
Julian Elischer
julian at elischer.org
Sat Dec 18 09:09:02 PST 2004
Peter Jeremy wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-Dec-18 02:03:09 -0500, Gary Corcoran wrote:
>
>>I've just had *THREE* Maxtor 250GB hard disk failures on my
>>FreeBSD 4.10 server within a matter of days. One I could
>>attribute to actual failure. Two made me suspicious. Three
>>has me wondering if this is some software problem... (or
>>a conspiracy (just kidding) ;-) )
>
>
> Seems unlikely that faulty server software could cause a disk failure.
> One possibility is that your power supply is a but stressed and the
> supply rails are out of tolerance. The other possibility is that the
> drives are overheating. Higher density drives will be more sensitive
> to both heat and dirty power.
>
>
>> I suppose it
>>is possible these errors may have shown up more than a week or
>>two ago, because my windows machines, reaching them via samba,
>>haven't shown any problems until today, and of course with almost
>>750GB of data, it's not all accessed over a short time span.
>
>
> My approach to this is to add a line similar to
> dd if=/dev/ad0 of=/dev/null bs=32k
> for each disk into /etc/daily.local (or /etc/weekly.local or whatever).
> This ensures that the disks are readable on a regular basis.
>
>
>>P.S. I *can't* be the first person to run into this problem:
>>When one gets a "hard error" reported for a certain block number,
>>how does one find out exactly *which* file or directory is now
>>unreadable? With hundreds of thousands of megabytes on one disk,
>>a manual search is not practical - somebody must have written a
>>program to 'backtrack' a block number to a particular file name
>>- no?
>
I generally do a tar cf /dev/lubb /mountpoint
We have some tools that do teh reverse..
tell you what blocks are in a file..
It should be possible to modify fsck to do the inverse..
fsck -n --findblocks 234234,56546,2342342
>
> I know I've done this in the past but I don't recall exactly how.
> About all you can do is search through the inode list for the
> relevant blocks and then map the inode numbers to file names.
>
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