On Sun, Apr 29, 2007 at 10:58:48 +0000, Thufir <hawat.thufir@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I'm getting SMART errors, but I'm not sure how much credence to give > them. It seems to be the same two e-mails over and over. > > The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon: > > Device: /dev/hdb, 2 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors It might be that the drive firmware has a bug where as the pending sector count doesn't always get cleared when the sectors are reallocated. I have a Maxtor drive that has that problem. It might also be that you have never written of the bad sectors so the drive can't reallocate them. If they really can't be read a long scan should be showing up a bad sector that you can then find the file it is contained in (so you know what you are losing) and then rewrite that sector (actually you want to rewrite the whole 8 sector block to keep the OS from trying to read the surrounding sectors). If the sector is permanently bad the drive should reallocate it. Sometimes just an isolated write was bad and the sector doesn't need to be remapped.
