On Mon, Sep 04, 2006 at 13:00:26 -0400, Paul Michael Reilly <pmr@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > The smartd daemon (Fedora Rawhide) is starting to indicate that the > hard drive has pending unreadable sectors: > > Sep 3 08:01:43 roamer smartd[2032]: Device: /dev/hda, 9 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors > > These have been occurring over the past few days on my (~3 year old) > A31p Thinkpad. My first take is that the system is trying to tell me > that it is time to replace the hard drive. Before ordering a new > drive, I figured I'd bounce this off the lists for second opinions. 9 sectors isn't all that many bad sectors. If you continue to get more bad sectors on a daily basis you probably do need to replace the drive. Certainly now would be a good time to make sure you have everything backed up. One important note is that your drive will not remap those sectors to its spares until it either gets a good read or you give up on getting the data back (signified by writing over the problem sectors). You probably want to try to figure out which files these sectors are in so that you know what data you have lost. There is a description on how to do this for ext3/2 file systems at: http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/BadBlockHowTo.txt When you are ready you can write over the sectors using dd.
