Questionable Status
Tony Nelson
tonynelson at georgeanelson.com
Wed Sep 23 18:53:10 UTC 2009
On 09-09-23 09:29:56, Gene Poole wrote:
> I've very recently upgraded 2 of my machines. One machine was
> upgraded from Fedora 9 to Fedora 11, and the other machine was
> upgraded from Fedora 10 to Fedora 11. On machine 1 I have 2-hard
> disks (both Seagate's - 500 GB and 1000 GB), on machine 2 I have 1-
> hard disk (Western Digital 320 GB). All of the interfaces are SATA.
> The questionable status is that on machine 1 the 500 GB drive is
> showing as failing and on machine 2 the 20 GB drive is showing as
> failing. Neither drive, under the old releases, showed up as failing.
> How do I know that these drive are truly failing?
1) Wait. If the disk is going bad, it will fail.
2) Run as root `smartctl -A /dev/sdx` (for each sdx) and look at the
"WHEN_FAILED" column; it will be "-" if not failed.
3) Run as root `smartctl -a /dev/sdx` (for each sdx) and look at the
whole output.
4) Run as root `smartctl -t long /dev/sdx` (for each sdx) and wait
until the time the test should finish, then view the results with
`smartctl -l selftest /dev/sdx` (for each sdx) or `smartctl -a /dev/
sdx` (for each sdx).
See `man smartctl`.
Note that the new disk health monitoring tool "palimpsest" in package
gnome-disk-utility is panicky and not to be trusted, unless you like
buying lots of hard drives. It doesn't just look at "WHEN_FAILED", but
has its own criteria such as nonzero Reallocated_Event_Count, which is
fairly normal for a modern drive that has been in use for a while. A
nonzero Current_Pending_Sector or Offline_Uncorrectable are bad, as
they mean data loss, though not general drive failure. I recommend
enabling Automatic Offline Testing with `smartctl -o on /dev/sdx` (for
each sdx), which will do a surface scan every few hours, giving the
best chance to repair or recover any sectors that are going bad.
--
____________________________________________________________________
TonyN.:' <mailto:tonynelson at georgeanelson.com>
' <http://www.georgeanelson.com/>
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