Tim wrote:
Thufir:
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
Bruno Wolff III:
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.
I had a system using LVM fail to boot, and when assessed using another
drive (that would boot), got error reports like the above. Wherever the
errors were, it was some place that LVM really did not like. I used dd
to overwrite the entire drive, to try and force a write to wherever it
was, and force the drive to try and fix what it could, and the errors
got cleared up.
Nothing else I had tried cleared up the errors. The system got
reinstalled, without LVM, just to see if the drive would keep on
working, and it has. It's many months later, and there's no error
reports, including while making deliberate checks.
I have had the same issue with a Western Digital as well. A WD5200
started giving these errors in FC6. Less than a year old.
I have since replaced the drive and put the WD in a USB carrier. Two
complete wipes and reformats and tests and no errors found.
I wonder if it is an issue with SMART and the drives?
--
Due to the move to M$ Exchange Server,
anything that is a priority, please phone.
Robin Laing
