[CentOS] PATA Hard Drive woes

Wed Nov 3 16:01:58 UTC 2010
Keith Roberts <keith at karsites.net>

On Wed, 3 Nov 2010, Todd Denniston wrote:

> To: CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org>
> From: Todd Denniston <Todd.Denniston at tsb.cranrdte.navy.mil>
> Subject: Re: [CentOS] PATA Hard Drive woes
> 
> Keith Roberts wrote, On 11/03/2010 10:32 AM:
>> On Sun, 31 Oct 2010, Keith Roberts wrote:
>>
> <SNIP>
>> There were about 79 Seek errors in the SMART logs of the
>> HDD.
>>
> <SNIP>
>> 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?
>
> WFG: In writing it all, the seek motor knocked the dust 
> out of it's way? (what dust?) How about checking all the 
> smart attributes and seeing if others are elevated. 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.#Known_ATA_S.M.A.R.T._attributes
>
> Are you seeing any block "remap" activity? 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#Error_handling
>
>>
>> Is this disk usable, or is it still in need of replacing?
>>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.#Background You 
> have gotten SMART errors from this drive already, so: You 
> have to ask yourself, 'Do you feel lucky?', Well do y'a...
>
> And the other question: If this drive up and dies shortly 
> and I knew about the smart errors, will the data owner 
> complain more or less to me about the drive death later or 
> drive replacement hassle now?
>
> Only YOU (and the data owner) know the risk trade-off 
> levels you have to consider.
>

Thanks Todd for the reply.

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.

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?

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

Regards,

Keith

NB: The box is down now, and I'll try and test and identify 
the bad memory module next.