Root mail account is dying

[Paul Howarth]

A. Rick Anderson wrote:
> Whenever I attempt to access mail from root, it pauses, then dies with 
> the following error message.
> 
> Mail version 8.1 6/6/93.  Type ? for help.
> "/var/spool/mail/root": 47 messages 47 new
>  >N  1 root at Anar.galarik.or  Wed May 18 08:13  29/1103  "SMART error 
> (OfflineUncorrectableSector) detected on host: Anar"
>  N  2 root at Anar.galarik.or  Wed May 18 08:13  29/1106  "SMART error 
> (CurrentPendingSector) detected on host: Anar"
>  N  3 root at Anar.galarik.or  Thu May 19 02:03  26/989   "Cron <root at Anar> 
> /usr/bin/yum -y upgrade"
> ...
> fseek: Invalid argument
> panic: temporary file seek
> Aborted
> You have mail in /var/spool/mail/root
> 
> I am not worried about the particular messages being shown; I understand 
> what is going on there (I get SMART messages whenever I reboot the 
> machine).  My concern is that I can't get into root's mail.

Perhaps /var/spool/mail/root lives on one of the bad disk blocks that 
SMART is complaining about?

Can you copy /var/spool/mail/root to another file and then open it with 
"Mail -f filename"?

Paul.