On Wed, 2 Aug 2006 at 6:02pm, Alfred von Campe wrote
the CentOS smartctl _does_ work (for me at least) with SATA disks if you use the "-d ata" option. So please try smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda
I was able to run this command and the output is attached. Does anything there point to a disk HW failure? I still think that I'm just suffering from file system corruption.
You shouldn't see *any* (IMO) ATA errors in the SMART Error log of a healthy disk -- yours has 273. Also, you have 1 Reallocated Sector, 16 Pending reallocations, and 10 "Offline Uncorrectable" errors. It really looks to me like the disk is bad.
Download Maxtor's disk assessment tool and run it on the disk. It'll likely tell you it's bad and give you a code you can give to Maxtor to get your warranty replacement.