Palimsest discrepancy

[ergodic]

Finally back in town again and back to Palimpsest.
A little background first.  My box is a  Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield at 2.4GHz, Asus P5K mobo, 6GB core, XFX GeForce 8600 video card and two hard drive drawers. For OS, Grub1 multi-booting Fedora 15, 16, 17β, Win-XP and Win-7.

By January 2011, Fedora 14 reported for the Maxtor 320GB drive: “DISK HAS MANY BAD SECTORS   Age: 136.0 days     PwrCycles: 1285    Bad sectors: -4”,   with a recommendation for immediate back-up and replacement.
At that time a Seagate ST1000  1TB drive was installed internally in the box and partitioned to accept various data partitions and a Fedora  OS to be used as a back-up OS.  The system normally operates from one of the OSs in a drive slipped in one of the drive drawers.  All data in the Maxtor 320GB was moved to the Seagate drive and is periodically imaged  to another external  drive via a drawer.

The  Maxtor 320 GB drive was imaged to a new WD 320GB drive for back-up.  The Maxtor was kept in service to see when it would fail.  So far it has not!

What has changed in F-17β from F-14,F-15 and F-16 to change the report to OK with 0 bad sectors.

 All three previous Fedoras still report for the disk as of today:  “DISK HAS MANY BAD SECTORS  Age: 248.3 days     PwrCycles: 3370      Bad sectors: -4”.      This amounts to   2695.2  hours  and   2085  power cycles: since the first warning.

A Samsung 160GB that was removed from service o  2010-11-07 at	 age: 90.7 days  with  1115 power  cycles and  12 bad sectors, shows under F-14, F-15 and F-16 “ Disk has a few bad sectors” . With F-17β it shows “ Disk is OK            Age: 104.7 days    Power Cycles: 1271  Bad Sectors: 12    Pending Sectors: 0”

hdtune-224 in Windows XP reports the Maxtor as OK.

My question is one of trust,  which one is accurate?   

However, I am inclined to believe that is the way Maxtor reports the parameter in question.

Thanks to all,

Cheers.


----- Original Message -----
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

-- 
test mailing list
test at lists.fedoraproject.org
To unsubscribe:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/test