Smartd message: What does it mean?

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Fri, Oct 28, 2005 at 18:59:09 -0700,
  "Daniel B. Thurman" <dant at cdkkt.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Folks,
> 
> Trying to understand this message, any ideas?
> 
> This email was generated by the smartd daemon running on:
> 
>    host name: xxx.xxx.com
>   DNS domain: xxx.com
>   NIS domain: (none)
> 
> The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon:
> Device: /dev/hdb, 14 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors
> For details see host's SYSLOG (default: /var/log/messages).

Probably you are going to lose the data in those 14 sectors. The smartd
home page has links to some pages that document how to find out what files
are using these blocks one at least ext2/3 and maybe some other file systems.
You can use that to tell you which files have been corrupted.
If you are running raid 1, you can copy of the sectors from the mirror.
Once you rewrite those sectors they will be remapped by the drive and
work correctly.
Losing 14 sectors by itself isn't a strong indication you need to by a new
hard drive. You might want to look at the output from smartctl -a to
see if anything else looks fishy. If you continue to lose sectors, that
would also be an indication that the drive is dying and should be replaced.