smartd message

[don vogt]

  don vogt <donvogt2001 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>  1. Am I right, that I don't have a big problem
> (yet?)?

>>That depends on where the unreadable sector is. If
it >>is in the middle of
>>an important file it could cause you problems. You
>>can use smartctl
>>to get the sector number.

 I wasn't able to figure that out from the man page,
Maybe my drives smart attributes don't cover that.

>>As for whether or not you should replace the disk,
>>that is up to you. Even
>>one bad block indicates the failure rate of this
disk >>is several times that
>>of a similar disk without any reallocated sectors.
If >>you had infinite
>>money you would want to replace the disk.

>  2. Is there some way to make the message stop,
short
> of disabling smartd on that disk?

>>The default for most things is that you only get one
>>warning message. You
>>could look at /etc/smartd.conf and see if the
options >>there cause some
>>other behavior. "man smartd.conf" will tell you what
>>the options do.

 Thanks much.  I did a lot more research and, while I
am still somewhat confused, I plan to get a new drive
and try to clone this one. (I pulled the power plug
for now)
  There is another smart attrribute that is something
like "relocated sectors", and I think the count number
is 19. I interpret that as another sentence of death
for the drive.
 That normalized count system is really confusing me.
I read several times what the man page says about it
but I can't seem to logically apply it. Maybe it is my
drive, it is pretty old. I would have posted the
output but the drive is powered down now. Since I am
going for a replacement I can wait till later to try
to figure it out. Bye the way, I was a rocket
scientist for a while so it seems I should be able to
figure  out the linux man pages, but that isn't always
true..
 Thanks again.