[aklug] hard drive issues

A few cosmic convergences happening with my IDE storage.
1. I have hda & hdb, both loose DMA settings reliably.
2. Smartmontools 'smartctl' reports a high count :
'Raw_Read_Error_Rate', 'Seek_Error_Rate', fortunately? the
'Hardware_ECC_Recovered' equals the 'Raw_Read_Error_Rate'.

 The 'Reallocated_Sector_Ct' is at zero which means that, afaikt, that
nothing is physically happening, yet. Also the 'Current_Pending_Sector'
& 'Offline_Uncorrectable' count is zero.
It should be noted that the smartmon stuff reports errors but does not
fix them.

3. It was mentioned Friday Nite the Steve Gibson's 'Spinrite' tools
fixes magnetic media issues. Unwilling to spend $89 on a 'black box' solution
I found the tools in Linux that do the same.
http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/badblockhowto.html

A brief list of tools:
smartctl -l selftest /dev/hda
smartctl -A /dev/hda
fdisk -lu /dev/hda
Tune2fs -l /dev/hda3 | grep Block
debugfs, cool tool .
and "dd'

A quick fix :'e2fsck with, at least, the -c option,
which uses 'badblocks' and moves data, remaps bad blocks :-)

Google is full of hits on the results of SMART enabled drives. Me
thinks it causes much wasted time and anxiety. I mention this because
the new Ubuntu 9.10 is using a new hard drive health tool that pops up
on every boot telling the user that the hard drive is ABOUT to fail.

I am maybe a litle closer to understanding hard drive issues :-) I
have renewed interest in backups.

ps, I used the 'System Rescue Cd' on an Ext4 partition.

-- 
Peace
Greg Madden
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