smartd reporting disk failing

[Gabriel Ramirez]

On 04/25/2011 08:11 PM, Paolo Galtieri wrote:
>
> I also have 2 other external drives (both 1.5Tb) that work just fine. In
> fact they sit right next to the Seagate Go drive.  What's interesting is
> that when I boot to Win 7 and test the drive Windows says there are no
> problems (of course it is Windows so I don't necessarily trust what it
> tells me).  I've had drives fail, but usually this is accompanied by
> obvious problems such as corrupted files and there tends to be kernel
> messages in /var/log/messages.
>
> At this point I'm not sure what to do.
>
> Paolo

substitute the sda by the device reported by smartd in the following line:

smartctl -a /dev/sda | less

there look for the lines:

- SMART overall-health self-assessment test result

if the result is FAILED, I recommend replace your disk

- Reallocated_Sector_Ct
- Reallocated_Event_Count
- Current_Pending_Sector

if the last column of the above lines aren't zero, well sometimes some 
sectors cannot read/write anymore so the disk remaps them with spare 
sectors,

so a disk with bad sectors can work normally, but if the disk runs out 
from spare sectors well at that moment the disk is bad

Gabriel