[ltp] Hard drive going bad ...?

[Mendel Cooper]

On Mon, 4 Sep 2006, Paul Michael Reilly wrote:

> The smartd daemon (Fedora Rawhide) is starting to indicate that the
> hard drive has pending unreadable sectors:
>
> Sep  3 08:01:43 roamer smartd[2032]: Device: /dev/hda, 9 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors
>
> These have been occurring over the past few days on my (~3 year old)
> A31p Thinkpad.

Usually, when a hard drive is beginning to go bad, you'll _hear_ it
as it makes repeated seeks to try a read and/or write. It'll click and
whine. You'll also get a seek error message in /var/log/messages (or
by doing a "dmesg).

There are also drive testing utilities, such as DFT (Drive Fitness Test),
which runs from DOS. You can download this from
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm, among other places.

Good luck.