On 03/17/2009 06:47 AM, Myrosia Dzikovska wrote:
Well, it may not be that simple. I keep meaning to make this a bug report, but can't get to it. I regularly get a warning message on logging into KDE that my hard disk is about to fail, whith the following info in the logs
Mar 16 21:44:26 myrosia-home2 smartd[3641]: Device: /dev/sda, 230905559 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors Mar 16 21:44:26 myrosia-home2 smartd[3641]: Device: /dev/sda, 46300938 Offline uncorrectable sectors
I have used this machine for 8 months now getting the same messages (numbers are changing), and no crash as yet. My co-worker has the exact same hardware, but 10.3 instead of 11.0, and he is getting the same messages. His machine has functioned without any trouble for 18 months now. So I am not sure what's going on with SMART for us, but by now I believe that it's not going to crash anytime soon (even though I backup as a matter of good practice)
Myrosia
Remember smartd is only a monitoring program. It does NOT generate the info, just reports it. It is your hard drive that generates it. It is understandable because of the time that you could doubt the errors are serious, but they really are. Most modern HD have a certain amount of space reserved for remapping bad spots to this reserved area. Once that is exhausted, you will start experiencing data loss. An uncorrectable error is one that could not be remapped, which AFAIK means the reserved space is exhausted. Where the data loss happens may not adversely affect you for a while, but it is still data loss. Backups are good for recovery, but if the manufacturer's data from the drive indicates impending failure, I know from experience that cloning for a replacement is so much easier before it is that far gone. I would rather clone a drive that is failing but hasn't got too far gone (with gparted Live cd) than wait til it is a recovery of data/reinstall/whatever situation. -- Joe Morris Registered Linux user 231871 running openSUSE 11.1 x86_64 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org