On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 10:14 PM, nate <centos at linuxpowered.net> wrote: > > Download the manufacturer's tools and run a diagnostics on it, > it will tell you the truth about what's going on. > > I wouldn't trust any generic OS tools over the manufacturer's tools, > there was a discussion on this topic on this list I think not too > long ago. The biggest gotcha with the vendor tools though is > they are usually limited in the types of disk controllers they > support. > I was going to laugh this off 'cuz how many manufacturers support Linux, but I was pleasantly surprised, twice, when I found that a) Seagate does and b) the seatools for Linux produced no errors on the long test. It also told me lots of interesting information that I don't recall at the moment, not the least of which was that the drive does not support DST (the on-board diagnostics test), which I thought was odd. Based on some of the other responses, I think I'll run smartctl to see what it says, but that still doesn't really answer the question about the number (4294967295 which happens to be FFFFFFFF). There are only a little over 5 billion sectors on the disk in total - how could 4.3 billion of them be bad? I'm thinking it's more likely a 32-bit v. 64-bit issue, but I haven't finished looking at that yet. One other thing that I find interesting: the drives that are showing smart errors are /dev/hdb and /dev/sda. In order from oldest to newest, my drives are: /dev/hdb - Maxtor 120GB PATA /dev/hda - Maxtor 160GB PATA /dev/sda - Seagate 300GB SATA /dev/sdb - WD 320GB SATA The older of each of the PATA and SATA drives are the ones showing the errors.... Thanks. mhr