Ok, I saw more sectors on a drive yesterday, so this morning, no one was running on it, and I took it out of use, then bounced it onto a DVD, and ran fsck -c (check for bad blocks). It finished. I bounce the server.
And SMARTD reports the sectors as "currently unreadable (pending) sectors", and "offline uncorrectable sectors".
Does smartd cache its info somewhere, or is it reading what fsck already marked as bad? And this has happened before, under 5.3, and under continuing current updates of 5.4....
mark
On 02/25/2010 02:25 PM, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
Ok, I saw more sectors on a drive yesterday, so this morning, no one was running on it, and I took it out of use, then bounced it onto a DVD, and ran fsck -c (check for bad blocks). It finished. I bounce the server.
And SMARTD reports the sectors as "currently unreadable (pending) sectors", and "offline uncorrectable sectors".
Does smartd cache its info somewhere, or is it reading what fsck already marked as bad? And this has happened before, under 5.3, and under continuing current updates of 5.4....
smartd queries the drive directly. Running "fsck -c" will have caused the drive to discover all of the unreadable sectors within that file system and mark them as "pending reallocation". Those sectors will remain in the "pending" state and visibly bad to the OS until the next time they are written. If you were able to copy all of the files from that FS without error, that suggests that all of the bad sectors are in free space, and you could stimulate reallocation by filling all of the free space with zeros:
mount /dev/{whatever} /mnt dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/xxxxxx bs=64k sync rm /mnt/xxxxxx umount /mnt
Then run "smartctl -A" on the drive and see if it still reports pending sectors.
Of course if that drive is continuing to develop new bad sectors you should get rid of it immediately.
m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
Ok, I saw more sectors on a drive yesterday, so this morning, no one was running on it, and I took it out of use, then bounced it onto a DVD, and ran fsck -c (check for bad blocks). It finished. I bounce the server.
And SMARTD reports the sectors as "currently unreadable (pending) sectors", and "offline uncorrectable sectors".
I recommend to replace that disc ASAP. When they start having to reallocate more sectors, they are in a pending complete failure state.
Mike
m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
Ok, I saw more sectors on a drive yesterday, so this morning, no one was running on it, and I took it out of use, then bounced it onto a DVD, and ran fsck -c (check for bad blocks). It finished. I bounce the server.
And SMARTD reports the sectors as "currently unreadable (pending) sectors", and "offline uncorrectable sectors".
I recommend to replace that disc ASAP. When they start having to reallocate more sectors, they are in a pending complete failure state.
Actually, the f/s is back in read-only mode, so I'm going to do that. It still bothers me that after an fsck -c, and a reboot, that SMARTD still saw the same number of sectors as bad.
On Fri, 2010-02-26 at 16:27 -0500, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
Ok, I saw more sectors on a drive yesterday, so this morning, no one was running on it, and I took it out of use, then bounced it onto a DVD, and ran fsck -c (check for bad blocks). It finished. I bounce the server.
And SMARTD reports the sectors as "currently unreadable (pending) sectors", and "offline uncorrectable sectors".
I recommend to replace that disc ASAP. When they start having to reallocate more sectors, they are in a pending complete failure state.
Actually, the f/s is back in read-only mode, so I'm going to do that. It still bothers me that after an fsck -c, and a reboot, that SMARTD still saw the same number of sectors as bad.
That's because fsck remaps /file system/ blocks to spares while the firmware/vendor diags handles media sectors. So if you fsck's inumerable times, the drive firmware is not affected and still sees the /original/ bad sectors until those are re-mapped.
<snip sig stuff>
HTH
On Fri, 2010-02-26 at 15:23 -0600, Mike McCarty wrote:
<snip>
I recommend to replace that disc ASAP. When they start having to reallocate more sectors, they are in a pending complete failure state.
I second that. I had a SATA drive that showed a few bad sectors in 2008 sometime. I got the vendor software (DOS version) and ran the diags and repair. Used it for another year or so.
Bad sectors started appearing again and I knew what this meant. Started taking more frequent backups. When it was convenient, downloaded the latest diags from the vendor, ran it repeatedly and every time it found and repaired more bad sectors and finally confirmed the drive was NG. Warranty exchange was easy and prompt.
If you've been through a small initial set of bad sectors and are now seeing more (especially if you ran the vendor's software), the drive is living on borrowed time.
This has been characteristic of drives for decades - a few early defects may appear, re-map and the drive works a very long time but when more start appearing a slow death is in progress.
Mike
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m.roth＠5-cent.us -
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William L. Maltby