[CentOS] was, PATA Hard Drive woes, is "SMART"

Nicolas Thierry-Mieg Nicolas.Thierry-Mieg at imag.fr
Wed Nov 3 18:22:52 UTC 2010


m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
> Warren Young wrote:
>> On 11/3/2010 11:27 AM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
>>> Yeah, but I have problems with smartmon:
>>
>> More likely, problems with SMART.  S.M.A.R.T. is D.U.M.B. :)
>>
>> It's better than nothing, but sometimes not by a whole lot.
>>
>>> one server that's got two bad sectors, which SMART reports. I've
>>> followed the instructions on how to make the log messages go away, and
> fsck -c...
>>> but on reboot, SMART seems to ignore what badblocks found, and the
>>> irritating messages are back.
>>
>> It may be that SpinRite could fix that by forcing a remap.
>
> Dunno if we have SpinRite around here.
>>
>> Another option -- which I didn't mention because it probably isn't an
>> option for the original poster, but which may work with your servers --
>> is that some high-end RAID systems can do something like SpinRite at
>> level 4+, as can ZFS.  They call it resilvering.  I don't think these
>
> No joy - it's a plain SATA drive, the root drive on a server we use for
> backups. ext3, and no, I'm not going to change filesystem types.... The
> real thing is why does SMART ignore the results of badblocks (for those
> who aren't sure, that's invoked when you do fsck -c), and for that matter,
> why the drive (Seagate ST3170811AS) doesn't automagically relocate those
> blocks.

AFAIK smart doesn't know or care about filesystems, it's at a lower 
level than that.
fsck -c is a read-only scan, bad blocks are then added to the bad block 
inode (which smart knows nothing about), and this might not be enough 
for the disk to hide the blocks (which should satisfy smart).
Maybe try fsck -cc for a non-destructive read-write test.



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