[CentOS] PATA Hard Drive woes

On Sun, 31 Oct 2010, Keith Roberts wrote:

> To: CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org>
> From: Keith Roberts <keith at karsites.net>
> Subject: Re: [CentOS] PATA Hard Drive woes
> 
> On Sun, 31 Oct 2010, William Warren wrote:
>
>> To: CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org>
>> From: William Warren <hescominsoon at emmanuelcomputerconsulting.com>
>> Subject: Re: [CentOS] PATA Hard Drive woes
>>
>> On 10/31/2010 3:27 PM, Keith Roberts wrote:
>>> Hi All.
>>>
>>> Yesterday I was installing Centos 5.5 to my web server, and
>>> it looks like the main hard drive has gone AWOL.
>>>
>>> Fedora 12 put the file system into r/o mode.
>>>
>>> The drive is an Hitachi, still under warranty.
>>>
>>> There are bad sectors on it, and running the Hitachi DFT
>>> tool confirms this. Also I cannot repair the bad sectors.
>>>
>>> Would this be caused by a faulty I/O chip, or is it safe to
>>> say it's definately the HDD at fault?
>>>
>>> Kind Regards,
>>>
>>> Keith Roberts
>>>
>> hdd at fault
>
> OK - thanks for confirming that Bill.
>
> I'll remove it and take it back for replacement.
>
> Keith

There were about 79 Seek errors in the SMART logs of the 
HDD.

I moved the drive from the Primary Master cable, to the 
Secondary Master cable, and I ran Hitachi's DFT tool, did a 
complete disk erase, and that terminated with errors.

So to prepare the disk for returning under warranty, I used 
another HDD utility to clean the disk again, still on Sec 
Master cable.

I used vivard 0.4 to do a complete disk erase.

That was on the http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/index.html

Under HDD utils.

vivard did not show any errors when doing a full disk erase.

So I ran an Advanced r/w scan again with Hitachi DFT, and 
the result was OK.

Any ideas what's happening please?

Is this disk usable, or is it still in need of replacing?

Kind Regards,

Keith Roberts