New harddisk: "CANNOT READ BLK" Cause?

[Michael Powell]

Jan Henrik Sylvester wrote:

> I got a new harddisk for my laptop, attached it via firewire, used "dump
> 0aLf - / | restore xf -" (from the FAQ), and swapped it with my internal
> one. During that, I also migrated /var and /usr to separate bsdlabels.
> 
> On reboot during fsck (ad0s1f), I got:
> 
> CANNOT READ BLK: 251403296
> CONTINUE? [yn] y
> 
> THE FOLLOWING DISK SECTORS COULD NOT BE READ: 251403296, 251403297,
> 251403298, 251403299,

Whenever I see messages like this I tend to wonder: "defective"?
 
> LOOK FOR ALTERNATE SUPERBLOCKS? yes
> 
> 32 is not a file system superblock
> SEARCH FOR ALTERNATE SUPER-BLOCK FAILED. YOU MUST USE THE
> 
> Is there a problem with the harddisk? Did I do anything wrong? How do I
> find out?
> 
[snip]

I'm going to assume here that you still have the old HD and it is set aside
out of the way and is OK as a backup. Me, what I think I'd do is leave the
new drive installed, wipe it clean, and try a fresh install from CDROM.
Reboot and look for these errors. If they magically are no longer present
I'd suspect something went wrong using the Firewire port on the first go
around.

If you see them again I'd suspect the drive may be faulty with bad media
spots and would be a candidate for RMA replacement. There may be a disk
diagnostic available which can confirm bad media. Eliminate the hardware as
faulty first, just to get it out of the way.

-Mike