[CentOS] PATA Hard Drive woes

On 11/3/2010 11:27 AM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
> Yeah, but I have problems with smartmon:

More likely, problems with SMART.  S.M.A.R.T. is D.U.M.B. :)

It's better than nothing, but sometimes not by a whole lot.

> one server that's got two bad sectors, which SMART reports. I've followed
> the instructions on how to make the log messages go away, and fsck -c...
> but on reboot, SMART seems to ignore what badblocks found, and the
> irritating messages are back.

It may be that SpinRite could fix that by forcing a remap.

Another option -- which I didn't mention because it probably isn't an 
option for the original poster, but which may work with your servers -- 
is that some high-end RAID systems can do something like SpinRite at 
level 4+, as can ZFS.  They call it resilvering.  I don't think these 
systems do statistical reconstruction, but periodic read-then-rewrite 
can stave off the need to reconstruct.