Hard drive troubleshooting

Ted Roche TEDROCHE at comcast.net
Wed May 10 20:49:01 EDT 2006


In /var/log/messages, smartd is reporting:

Device: /de/hdb, 3 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors

I'm trying to figure out where they are and how to fix them or mark  
them as bad.

Took the machine down last night and ran SpinRite 6 on it. It  
reported no problems on the drive.

Ran the smartctl tests, both short and long, and they finished  
without errors.

There's a great HOWTO on fixing bad blocks at http:// 
smartmontools.sourceforge.net/badBlockHowTo.txt, but I don't seem to  
have any bad blocks to fix.

Ideas on what else I can do to find/fix the errors?

I'm downloaded the Western Digital diagnostics now and will see if  
that gets me anywhere... nope. Long and short tests all report no error.

Would be glad to post the full smartctl diagnostics if anyone would  
like to read them.

Since all the tests pass, I wondered if something else could be the  
source of the problems, like a driver, but SMART should be bypassing  
OS drivers and speaking to the hardware, I think.

The drive shows Power-On hours over 33,000, so I'll plan on a  
replacement in any case, but I'm curious how to troubleshoot from  
here. Ideas welcomed.


Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com





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