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.