On Wed, 3 Nov 2010, Todd Denniston wrote:
To: CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org From: Todd Denniston Todd.Denniston@tsb.cranrdte.navy.mil Subject: Re: [CentOS] PATA Hard Drive woes
Keith Roberts wrote, On 11/03/2010 10:32 AM:
On Sun, 31 Oct 2010, Keith Roberts wrote:
<SNIP> > There were about 79 Seek errors in the SMART logs of the > HDD. > <SNIP> > vivard did not show any errors when doing a full disk erase. > > So I ran an Advanced r/w scan again with Hitachi DFT, and > the result was OK. > > Any ideas what's happening please?
WFG: In writing it all, the seek motor knocked the dust out of it's way? (what dust?) How about checking all the smart attributes and seeing if others are elevated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.#Known_ATA_S.M.A.R.T._attributes
Are you seeing any block "remap" activity? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#Error_handling
Is this disk usable, or is it still in need of replacing?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.#Background You have gotten SMART errors from this drive already, so: You have to ask yourself, 'Do you feel lucky?', Well do y'a...
And the other question: If this drive up and dies shortly and I knew about the smart errors, will the data owner complain more or less to me about the drive death later or drive replacement hassle now?
Only YOU (and the data owner) know the risk trade-off levels you have to consider.
Thanks Todd for the reply.
There were no sectors remapped, which is odd as there were bad sectors originally on the drive. I ran MemTest86+ out of curiousity, and there are 5120 Errors, some at 0.4MB & 0.5 MB.
The BIOS has been playing up, not recognising the Primary Master drive. This is the channel the Hitachi disk was on when it developed the sector read errors.
Could a bad controller or bad RAM cause Hard Drive sector errors?
The drive is as good as uninstalled, so I may as well send it for replacement.
Regards,
Keith
NB: The box is down now, and I'll try and test and identify the bad memory module next.