[CentOS] PATA Hard Drive woes

[RedShift]

On 11/03/10 17:01, Keith Roberts wrote:
>
> 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.
>

You should fix that first.

> 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?
>

Neither bad RAM or a bad controllor can physically damage a hard drive. A bad controller will not cause reallocated sectors. It can however cause UDMA CRC errors and other weird non-SMART related behaviour.

> The drive is as good as uninstalled, so I may as well send
> it for replacement.
>

Send the output of smartctl -a /dev/yourdisk, that'll give us more factual data than speculation.