[Bulk] re-mapping an older disk ??

[Alan Cox]

On Wed, 22 Feb 2012 12:21:49 -0700
Greg Woods <woods at ucar.edu> wrote:

> On Wed, 2012-02-22 at 11:00 -0600, Steven Stern wrote:
> > On 02/22/2012 10:56 AM, William Case wrote:
> 
> > > 1) Hardware from switching the disk's order around (channel 1 <==>
> > > channel 2 in BIOS)
> > > 2) Improperly installing or using LVM
> > > 3) Remapping
> > > 4) Hard drive really is broken.
> > > 
> > 
> > SMART talks directly to the disk, so #4 is the most likely case.
> 
> Since the OP did move disks around, another possibility is that a cable
> is not well-seated. This is always the first thing I check any time
> there is something that looks like a hardware problem.

Cable errors are reported differently. The drive is reporting two things

1. It's got bad sectors.
2. it's got sectors that it knows are bad but hasn't yet reassigned when
they next get written.

That may be bad or irrelevant. smartctl will ask the drive its own
opinion which is actually far more useful than the Fedora graphical tools.

It also allows you to run offline 'destructive' tests (ie they lose the
disk content) if you want the drive to do a complete self test.