The most common problem with harddrives that have been used a while is misalignment. As the actuator mechanism wears, it positions the heads slightly out of alignment from the original formatting marks recorded at the last low-level format.
I have "reconstituted" quite a number of ailing drives with the following: a) Backup all data and programs -- preferably using an image backup (the 'dd' command is great at this)
b) Run an appropriate low-level format utility: SCSI drives can use the SCSI adapter's on-board utility for this (take an older-MS-DOS bootable floppy with "debug.com" on it; at the debug prompt jump to the SCSI interactive BIOS: g=c800:6 (or try g=c800:0, g=c800:5 and some other start points)); IDE drives can use an older version of OnTrack's Disk Manager software (again in MS-DOS -- sorry).
Jeremy and others -- feel free to point out Linux equivalences!
c) Either mount the drive in another machine and perform a high-level format (creating partitions and filesystems) and restore the backup, or reinstall Linux minimally and then restore your backup. (I am not sure what special flags may be required to overwrite the booted-to root partition; I have not had to do this in Linux yet, but in Solaris and UnixWare you can boot to a "floppy-based" version that creates a RAM-disk and runs a small OS from there, whereby the harddisk can then be mounted and unmounted at will, and dd and cpio are available.)
I have seen quite a number of really-small Linux distros described at DistroWatch.Com that fit on a floppy, zip drive, credit-card sized CD, or even on a USB microdrive that have dd, cpio and other harddisk diagnostics utilities on them.
Under Solaris and UnixWare I have breathed life back into quite a number of failing harddisks this way.
Of course there is a lot to be said about a new harddisk, being as cheap as they are now. Who wants to fix a 2GB drive when you can afford a new 40GB to replace it?
On 12/17/2004 01:40 PM, Len Boyle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hello Brian
You might want to go to this site: http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/
Download the SeaTools Desktop Diagnostic tools. This tool should tell you if the disk is bad and if still cover by the warranty makes out the return form for you. Note requires windows create a bootable diagnostic floppy diskette.
len
On Fri, Dec 17, 2004 1:05 PM, Brian Henning wrote:Hi List, Someone mentioned that my HD might be on its way out, in
response to the strange errors I described earlier. So I went and ran
some SMART tests, and they all came back negative.. but the general SMART
stats looked kind of iffy, so I wanted to post them here and find out if
anyone had any comments, since I really don't completely know what I'm
looking at here. Some of the numbers seem high, but I don't know whether
high is good or bad.. :-P
-- Scott G. Hall Raleigh, NC, USA [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
