Hard Drive Issues

[George Allan]

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,
> Oct 13 03:01:31 tco1 kernel: ad2: FAILURE - READ_DMA 
> status=51<READY,DSC,ERROR> error=40<UNCORRECTABLE> LBA=181778119
> Oct 13 07:11:15 tco1 kernel: ad2: FAILURE - READ_DMA 
> status=51<READY,DSC,ERROR> error=40<UNCORRECTABLE> LBA=181778119
> 
> I'm assuming that particular sector on the drive is dying, I have backed 
> everything up on the drive, can anyone give me more information, should 
> the drive simply be replaced or is it possible that this is simply a TOC 
> error and could be corrected by newfs to the drive?
> 
> I'm guessing it will need to be replaced, output of smartctl is below....
> [...]

I ran into similar issues with what I believe was an identical Seagate
drive.  The customer service folks at Seagate weren't too interested in
discussing the output from smartmontools and insisted the only supported
method of monitoring drive health was using their own DOS utility
(available on their website).  So before replacing the drive, I decided
to give it a go.

The results were hardly informative as the the utility is designed on a
PASS/FAIL model.  It failed, of course, but the REPLACE THIS DRIVE
IMMEDIATELY warning message helped confirm things for me.  

Soon thereafter I needed to set up a Windows box and didn't have a drive
I was willing to spare, so I used the defective one which I still had
lying around.  Oddly enough, the setup went fine and still works to this
day.  Go figure.