On 11/08/2007 07:15 AM, Randall R Schulz wrote: > On Tuesday 06 November 2007 18:15, 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 would like to get some authoritative and definitive information about > the specific meaning of this warning. I'm a bit skeptical about the > dire warnings that these messages mean the drive is near the end of its > useful life. > AFAIK, what it means is that your hard drives internal auto correction has already used up all the allocated space to relocate bad sectors. That drive presently has a bad sector but is out of space to relocate it. If it was possible, the bad sector would automatically be remapped to a different sector. This one cannot, thus the warning. It could be no more sectors will go bad, and only the one will be pending to be relocated or remapped. If so, it could last a while longer. It could be some platter defect that will only get worse. > I have a drive that has only been in operation a few months (and it's > been a few months of very light use, at that) that is giving me a > couple of similar error messages: > > Device: /dev/sda, 2 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors > Device: /dev/sda, 2 Offline uncorrectable sectors > Above it was 1, is it now 2? Uncorrectable = not able to be remapped. Unreadable = bad. Pending = the drive auto correction would relocate it if it could. > What precisely do these SMART diagnostics mean? How can I get a more > detailed diagnosis or possibly remap the defective sectors? > > IIUC, your drives remap region is exhausted. It automatically remaps on its own if possible. All you could do is to reformat with bad blocks check to have the file system mark the bad sectors as bad so it does not try to write to it or read from it. Again, though, if the remap region is exhausted already, chances of failure are very high.
-- Joe Morris Registered Linux user 231871 running openSUSE 10.3 x86_64 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
