[CentOS] OT: SMART warning on hard drive, same warning for 2 1 /2 years

[MHR]

On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 3:10 PM, Lanny Marcus <lmmailinglists at gmail.com> wrote:
> My wife's box has a very intermittent problem,

Sounds kinda personal to me....

> when booting from the
> Maxtor IDE hard drive. This has been going on for about 2 1/2

Oh.  Never mind (bad humor).

> years.... The box is a Compaq EVO D300v for the Enterprise. When it
> boots, there is a SMART advisory from the BIOS that says failure is
> immenient. Occasionally, it will not boot, because the BIOS does not
> see the hard drive.
<snip>

Seriously, now....

If there's a hardware problem with the drive, like loose connections,
I'd get rid of it.  I would have suggested a warranty swap-out, which
you might be able to do if you still have the receipt or you
registered the purchase (and sometimes even if not - check with
Maxtor's web site), but it sounds like the drive may be out of
warranty.  Like I said, though, check with Maxtor - some of their
older drives had 5 year warranties, and they have a general warranty
period for all of their disks that yours might fall within.

I don't trust the SMART advisories all the time, mainly because I have
a 1+ year old Seagate SATA drive that gets a smartd error every 30
minutes when the checks are performed.  I have done numerous tests,
including the ones supplied by Seagate in their Linux seatools
package, and they all say that the drive is fine.  (The error is
suspicious anyway - it claims that there are 4294967295 unreadable or
offline sectors, which is way more than the drive could possibly have,
but that also just happens to be 0xFFFFFFFF....  Since I'm running an
AMD 64x2, I'd bet that it's a 32-64 bit compatibility issue with the
drive itself.  Neither of my other two disks, which are also SATA, get
any errors, and they're both WDs.)  That said, yours look much more
serious.

Conclusion: you are showing too many points of failure to warrant
keeping the drive.  Try to get a warranty replacement if you can, and
if that doesn't work, just get a new drive.  Since warranty
replacements are usually refurbished disks, and the new warranty ends
at the same time, you'd probably be better off with a new disk.

Them's my $0.04 (inflation, y'know).

HTH

mhr