On Sun, Aug 27, 2006 at 09:54:08 -0400, Kanwar Ranbir Sandhu <m3freak@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Sat, 2006-26-08 at 14:01 -0700, Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote: > > Aug 26 13:16:15 arbol smartd[2284]: Device: /dev/sdb, 3 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors > > Aug 26 13:16:15 arbol smartd[2284]: Device: /dev/sdb, 3 Offline uncorrectable sectors > > > > I'm at a loss as to how to proceed here. (Or is smartd reporting a > > problem that occurred in antiquity and I need to somehow acknowledge > > this to the disk and let it clear an error flag?) > > I've been getting a similar error for a few months: > > smartd[2602]: Device: /dev/hda, 1 Offline uncorrectable sectors > > Nothing else appears to be wrong with the hard drive. Googling for the > error message didn't help me to understand what it means. I've just > been hoping it doesn't turn into something worse. > > I know that doesn't help, but I thought I would let you know you're not > alone. The disk isn't going to do anything with the bad sectors until you either get a good read or write over them. If you do that then the disk may either not doing anything further or it may remap the sector to a spare depending on whether or not it thinks the problem is permanent. If you are running a raid 1 mirror you can copy the sectors from the mirror using dd (you probably want to use direct flag). To be a bit safer fail out the bad drive (this should be doable under any raid option but 0), write over the blocks to clear the errors (this can take a couple of tries if the problem is permanent but the drive thinks it might be permanent) and then add it back into the raid set. If you aren't using raid (or are using raid 0) then you probably should try to find out which files contain the bad blocks so that you know what data you are losing and can take appropiate action. There is some documentation on how to do this at: http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/BadBlockHowTo.txt
