[CentOS] OT: SMART warning on hard drive, same warning for 2 1 /2 years

Mon May 25 04:39:56 UTC 2009
Robert Nichols <rnicholsNOSPAM at comcast.net>

Lanny Marcus wrote:
> My wife's box has a very intermittent problem,  when booting from the
> Maxtor IDE hard drive. This has been going on for about 2 1/2
> years.... The box is a Compaq EVO D300v for the Enterprise. When it
> boots, there is a SMART advisory from the BIOS that says failure is
> immenient. Occasionally, it will not boot, because the BIOS does not
> see the hard drive.  I replaced the EIDE cable, but  the problem of
> sometimes not seeing the hard drive on boot continues. I suspect it
> has to do with something loose in the electronics of the drive,
> because if I press on both ends of the EIDE cable, the problem goes
> away and then it will boot OK.
[SNIP]
> === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
> SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: FAILED!
> Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours. SAVE ALL DATA.
> Failed Attributes:
> ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE
> UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
>  10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x002b   222   215   223    Pre-fail
> Always   FAILING_NOW 29

A spin-up failure could be caused by a weak power supply or a power
connector that is not making good contact.  It is not likely to be
a problem with the EIDE cable.  Note that even if you do correct the
problem, the SMART advisory will likely remain due to the accumulated
failure count, but the boot failures should stop.

-- 
Bob Nichols     "NOSPAM" is really part of my email address.
                 Do NOT delete it.