From: "Gene Heskett" <gene.heskett@xxxxxxxxxxx>
J.L. Coenders wrote:
Dear list,
I have a problem.
Smartd reports that I have bad sectors on my disk. I have tried checking it
with badblocks which also reports bad sectors.
I believe I have heard it is possible to repair this in a software manner. Is
this true, or do I need to buy a new disk?
Btw, fsck does not report any problems.
Thanks,
Jeroen
Then now is a good time to make a backup, and go buy a new disk, its on
its way out.
Indeed. Gene's advice is right on the money. If you do not have a
suitable known good spare disk then start a backup, get a new disk
in house or at least ordered with short delivery time, and pray.
Once you have the disk allow the backup to finish if you started one.
(It's always nice to have.)
Note that you MAY experience data loss even though fsckreports
no errors. Generally it does not read every block of every file to
determine of the data might be readable. It simply checks to make
sure the file system is OK.
With the new disk in hand several courses of action present themselves.
All involve getting it installed in the computer. If the old disk is
still seeming to work then you can create a second backup. This has
been discussed here many times. Visit the archives for the various
techniques and their good or bad features, "dd", "cp -a", tar-untar,
"cpio", and the like. Otherwise restore from such backup as you were
able to make and try to fill in the gaps.
When SMART starts showing multiple failures and actual disk tests
suggest the failures are present it is going to die, sooner rather
than later.
{^_^}
