At 08:53 PM 11/6/2007 -0600, Billie Walsh wrote:
Fernando Costa wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Some days ago I began to receive the following message: "Your hard disk
> drive is failing! S.M.A.R.T. message: Device: /dev/sda, 1 currently
> unreadable (pending) sector" I don't know what it refers to but I have
> run a Live Gparted CD to check the entire hard disk (200 GB) and some
> inodes where repaired but the message is still showing up when I restart
> the computer. Any idea on what to do?
Don't know if this helps, but a few years ago I had a computer that was
saying the same thing. I couldn't find anything wrong with the drive so
I turned off smart and used it another couple years before it finally
failed.
Just because you got lucky, doesn't mean he will. Why risk someone else's
data? If SMART says he has sectors that can't be read and are pending
relocation, he should dig into the drive and find out what's happening.
SMART runs _on_the_drive_itself_ and is closest to its function on the
lowest level. No external program can get a better read on the health of
the drive than SMART, which the drive runs on its own processor. What most
people think of as SMART (smartmontools, smartctl) is just a program to
send commands to the SMART process on the drive and read back results.
SMART watches a dozen parameters, like how long did it take to spin up,
what's the temperature on the drive, are bad sectors being relocated and at
what rate. Together, these spell out just exactly how healthy the drive is.
The BIOS configuration option that says "Enable SMART" really only does two
things: It usually enables the drive to respond to SMART, and it runs the
most basic SMART health check as a pass/fail. This is the equivalent of
"smartctl -s on /dev/sda" followed by "smartctl -H /dev/sda" (if your
drive is /dev/sda). He should run the -H option for a quick go/no go look
at the drive before you dig deeper.
This guy's most urgent need is to back up his drive and look for a good
deal on a replacement. But before actually placing that order, get and run
the smartMonTools package. Pending relocate sectors isn't fatal, but we
don't know if he's run any other SMART tests.
He should run a long test: smartctl -T long /dev/sda
This doesn't impact performance (much) and doesn't take the drive offline.
Read the test log before you start the test, better yet, print it. Then
read it again after and compare-- the drive doesn't know what time/date it
is, it only logs in power-on hours.
Read the logs like this:
smartctl -l error /dev/sda # read the error log
smartctl -l selftest /dev/sda # read the results of tests
Last, use smartctl -h for the other options.
The true strength of the SmartMonTools package is that smartd will report
all changes in performance to your messages file, which you can analyze later.
I even run it on my Winders boxes. Don't ask, not my idea to have them.
HTH
-Tom
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