SMART errors - are they for real? or, BIOS weirdness?

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Sun, Apr 29, 2007 at 10:58:48 +0000,
  Thufir <hawat.thufir at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm getting SMART errors, but I'm not sure how much credence to give 
> them.  It seems to be the same two e-mails over and over.
> 
> The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon:
> 
> Device: /dev/hdb, 2 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors

It might be that the drive firmware has a bug where as the pending sector
count doesn't always get cleared when the sectors are reallocated. I have
a Maxtor drive that has that problem.

It might also be that you have never written of the bad sectors so the drive
can't reallocate them. If they really can't be read a long scan should be
showing up a bad sector that you can then find the file it is contained in
(so you know what you are losing) and then rewrite that sector (actually
you want to rewrite the whole 8 sector block to keep the OS from trying
to read the surrounding sectors). If the sector is permanently bad the drive
should reallocate it. Sometimes just an isolated write was bad and the sector
doesn't need to be remapped.