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

Thomas Fjellstrom tfjellstrom at shaw.ca
Sun Aug 24 16:52:47 UTC 2008


On Sunday 24 August 2008, Chris Picton wrote:
> 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)
>

You can't be too careful if the information is important.. That said I 
recently (well, not _that_ recent, 6-12 months ago) had a 160GB Seagate give 
me the same problems. And the drive wouldn't reallocate those sectors so I 
figured it was toast. Till I ran a full read/write (destructive) "badblocks" 
scan, and a couple full SMART tests. That managed to cause the drive to 
reallocate said damaged sectors, and its been fine ever since. I think its the 
one I put in my firewall.

-- 
Thomas Fjellstrom
tfjellstrom at shaw.ca


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