Questionable Status

Tony Nelson tonynelson at georgeanelson.com
Wed Sep 23 18:53:10 UTC 2009


On 09-09-23 09:29:56, Gene Poole wrote:
> I've very recently upgraded 2 of my machines.  One machine was
> upgraded from Fedora 9 to Fedora 11, and the other machine was 
> upgraded from Fedora 10 to Fedora 11.  On machine 1 I have 2-hard 
> disks (both Seagate's - 500 GB and 1000 GB), on machine 2 I have 1-
> hard disk (Western Digital 320 GB).  All of the interfaces are SATA.  
> The questionable status is that on machine 1 the 500 GB drive is 
> showing as failing and on machine 2 the 20 GB drive is showing as 
> failing. Neither drive, under the old releases, showed up as failing. 
> How do I know that these drive are truly failing?

1) Wait.  If the disk is going bad, it will fail.

2) Run as root `smartctl -A /dev/sdx` (for each sdx) and look at the 
"WHEN_FAILED" column; it will be "-" if not failed.

3) Run as root `smartctl -a /dev/sdx` (for each sdx) and look at the 
whole output.

4) Run as root `smartctl -t long /dev/sdx` (for each sdx) and wait 
until the time the test should finish, then view the results with 
`smartctl -l selftest /dev/sdx` (for each sdx) or `smartctl -a /dev/
sdx` (for each sdx).

See `man smartctl`.

Note that the new disk health monitoring tool "palimpsest" in package 
gnome-disk-utility is panicky and not to be trusted, unless you like 
buying lots of hard drives.  It doesn't just look at "WHEN_FAILED", but 
has its own criteria such as nonzero Reallocated_Event_Count, which is 
fairly normal for a modern drive that has been in use for a while.  A 
nonzero Current_Pending_Sector or Offline_Uncorrectable are bad, as 
they mean data loss, though not general drive failure.  I recommend 
enabling Automatic Offline Testing with `smartctl -o on /dev/sdx` (for 
each sdx), which will do a surface scan every few hours, giving the
best chance to repair or recover any sectors that are going bad.

-- 
____________________________________________________________________
TonyN.:'                       <mailto:tonynelson at georgeanelson.com>
      '                              <http://www.georgeanelson.com/>




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