[clug] Warning message

[Alastair D'Silva]

Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_sector

Ever wonder why modern drives don't show any bad sectors? Modern hard drives
keep a bit of space spare, and will move data from bad sectors to this spare
area, and remap the sector internally. This map is stored on the discs,
which is why you can swap out a failed control board and still access the
disc correctly.

Your hard drive will automatically try to re-read and deliver the data that
has been requested from it. If it was successfully read eventually, or if
data has been written to that block, the drive will reallocate the data to
the spare area of the disc. If it was not able to successfully reallocate
the data, you will get the second message.

This means one of two things:

1. The drive is sufficiently screwed to have used all of its spare space
(smartctl will show this)
2. It was unable to read the data from that block

I recommend replacing the drive.

The backup you take may fail if it hits the same block reported in your
logs. You can resolve this by identifying and deleting/excluding the file
that contains that block. I'm not too sure myself how you could accomplish
this, but I'm sure someone else may be able to help.

-- 
Alastair D'Silva           mob: 0423 762 819
Networking Consultant      fax: 0413 181 661
New Millennium Networking  web: http://www.newmillennium.net.au
skype: alastair_dsilva     msn: alastair at d-silva.org
blog: http://alastair.d-silva.org




-----Original Message-----
From: linux-bounces+clug=d-silva.org at lists.samba.org
[mailto:linux-bounces+clug=d-silva.org at lists.samba.org] On Behalf Of keith
sayers
Sent: Saturday, 3 May 2008 9:49 AM
To: linux at lists.samba.org
Subject: [clug] Warning message


	I have recently moved to Suse 10.3 and when I log on I get a pair of
warning 
messages :
	Your hard disk drive is failing!  S.M.A.R.T. message :
	Device : /dev/sda, 4294967292 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors
and :
	Your hard disk is failing!  S.M.A.R.T. message :
	Device: /dev/sda, 4294967292. Offline uncorrectable sectors

	So far as I know there is nothing wrong with either of my hard
drives - could 
anyone explain this please and perhaps tell me what I should do?

	Thank you.
__________________________________________________________________
Keith Sayers
keiths at apex.net.au
6 Clambe Place
CHARNWOOD, ACT 2615                      http://www.apex.net.au/~keiths
__________________________________________________________________
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