[mythtv-users] Need help interpreting hard disk error messages

Chris Picton chrisp at tangent.co.za
Sun Aug 24 16:02:39 UTC 2008


On Sun, 2008-08-24 at 10:39 -0500, Craig Huff wrote:
> I have my O/S and original /video partition on a PATA harddrive that
> is reporting errors with smartd and logging messages in
> /var/log/messages, but I'm not sure where the problems lie (in a
> particular partition?) and how to fix them (if they are repairable).
> This may only be the result of transient problems I had with a loose
> power connector for the drive, or these may be precursors of a
> meltdown, so I kinda would like to know how big a cesspool I'm about
> to step into.

I would recommend you take a full backup of the drive asap.  You can do
this via tar or rsync or friends, so you can see what files are
potentially unreadable, but a lower level read, like ddrescue may allow
you to recover more.

Once you have a backup, then go wild with repartitioning/reformatting.
But from those messages, it looks like you probably don't want to be
using that drive anymore.

(So speaks someone who has just reinstalled his mythtv server due to
drive failure.  I was not able to recover anything useful from the
drive, even after running ddrescue for 5 days)

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