Hard Drive Issues

[David Kelly]

On Fri, Oct 13, 2006 at 03:03:31PM -0400, Richard McIntyre wrote:
> David Kelly wrote:
> 
> >On Thu, Oct 12, 2006 at 06:54:53PM +0100, Spiros Papadopoulos wrote:
> >
> >>Since as you say everything is working, maybe it is a good idea to
> >>take a look and run the fsck command at least it may give you some
> >>more information, which you can post in order to get better answers
> >
> >That too, but first I'd start with sysutils/smartmontools and see what
> >the drive and its built-in log says.
> 
> I'm having a similar problem,

[...]

> I'm guessing it will need to be replaced, output of smartctl is below....

[...]

> SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
> SMART support is: Disabled

Download the Seagate Tools CD, boot it, and enable SMART. Let the drive
repair itself. Problem is that the problem has gone on long enough that
the data in that block is totally lost.

>  After command completion occurred, registers were:
>  ER ST SC SN CL CH DH
>  -- -- -- -- -- -- --
>  40 51 04 c7 b6 d5 ea  Error: UNC 4 sectors at LBA = 0x0ad5b6c7 = 181778119

What you need to do is figure out what file occupied that LBA and deal
with its corruption. If part of the filesystem metadata then fsck will
deal with it as best as can be.

The Seagate tools will replace the bad block with a spare held in
reserve. The spare will answer to the old's LBA. If SMART had been
enabled in the first place the drive should have exchanged the block for
a spare before the data was lost without bothering you. Doesn't always
catch it in time. This sort of thing happens all the time.

Thats why the tool is smart *mon*, its a monitor that you can watch
inside the drive to see if its recovering from errors and on its last
legs. Death is usually pronounced when the drive runs out of spare
blocks for repair. Thats usually when a problem is first noticed.

-- 
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly at HiWAAY.net
========================================================================
Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.