Hard drive troubleshooting

[Ben Scott]

On 5/10/06, Ted Roche <TEDROCHE at comcast.net> wrote:
> In /var/log/messages, smartd is reporting:
>
> Device: /de/hdb, 3 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors

  I managed to find this mail list thread:

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=6194374&forum_id=12495

  Read down towards the end.  It sounds like some drives have buggy
firmware (surprise) that doesn't properly report bad sectors as
relocated after relocation, or something like that.

  That also led me to the http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/ page,
which includes mention of your error.  In particular:

"Normally when an uncorrectable sector is found, the disk puts this
onto a 'pending sector list' to indicate that it should be replaced
with a spare good sector. However this replacement won't take place
until either the disk can read the data on the bad sector, or is
commanded to write new data to that bad sector."

  So maybe that's it.

  If you don't already have the latest release of the SMART tools, you
might want to download and build it from source, to see if that sheds
further light on the problem.

  If you can get conclusive information, you can submit a bug report
to the drive manufactuer, who will probabbly ignore it.

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

  A few years ago, I had a client with a laptop whose hard disk
started to go kaput.  Laptop was running MS Win 98 SE with a FAT32
filesystem.  It wouldn't boot, failed SCANDISK, and kept giving DOS
critical errors trying to read files the client wanted.  Plus bad
sounding clicking noises.

  I'd heard lots of good things about SpinRite.  So I bought a copy of
SpinRite 5.  I ran it at it's most through setting.  SpinRite passed
the drive with flying colors, claming all maintenance was done and no
trouble was found.  Meanwhile, back at the DOS prompt, the DIR command
was still resulting in "Abort, Retry, Fail" sometimes.

  I asked GRC for my money back.  To their credit, they responded
promptly, refunded my money, and even offered to have me send the
drive to them for examination to figure out why.  I had to decline
that (wasn't my disk).

  So while I was happy with GRC as a company, I was very unimpressed
with SpinRite.  That's just one experience, of course.  Maybe it was a
fluke.  As I said, I've heard lots of good things about SpinRite,
including on this list.

-- Ben