Palimsest discrepancy

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2012-04-30 at 13:35 -0400, ergodic wrote:
> Has anyone experienced Palimpsest discrepancies?
> 
> Palimsest in Fedora 16 reports a disk (MAXTOR STM3320620AS) as
> failing:  "DISK HAS MANY BAD SECTORS" etc.
> SMART:  197 Current pending Sector Count Value -4 sectors.
> 
> Palimsest in Fedora 17 beta reports the same disk (MAXTOR
> STM3320620AS) as "OK"
> SMART:  197 Current pending Sector Count 0 sectors  OK.
> 
> Obviously one is incorrect, which one?

Interpretation of the SMART data can be tricky. There's a longstanding
bug where palimpsest considers numbers of 'bad' sectors that are well
within manufacturers' tolerances to indicate a failing disk:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=498115

and it's possible you hit that in F16 and it's been corrected, at least
for your particular disk, in F17. That '-4' does seem odd, though, as
another poster mentioned. The bug report linked above has some useful
diagnostic steps you can take.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net