RE: disk problems or false alarm??

From: Guolin Cheng (guolin_at_alexa.com)
Date: 04/30/04

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    Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2004 12:01:13 -0700
To: "For users of Fedora Core releases" <fedora-list@redhat.com>

    Hi, jludwig,

     Thanks for your helpful information.

     Because I'm running Linux, so I assume there are no viruses. Then comes
    several questions:

    1, How can I know whether all the spare sectors are in use and the disk
    will lose data, or it is just the beginning of disk failure?

    2, How I can identify that the hard drive becomes dying at the first
    minute?

    3, How to identify the malfunctioning hard drives? Should I idle the
    machine and test hard drives one by one to figure it out? Mostly it is
    the faiure-reporting hard drive failed, but I remember for sure, in a
    few cases, other alternative hard drives failed instead.

    4, Should I replace hard drives when I first see this kind of disk error
    messages in case data begin to lose?

     Thanks a LOT...

    --Guolin Cheng

    -----Original Message-----
    From: jludwig [mailto:wralphie@comcast.net]
    Sent: Friday, April 30, 2004 11:25 AM
    To: For users of Fedora Core releases
    Subject: Re: disk problems or false alarm??

    On Fri, 2004-04-30 at 13:54, Guolin Cheng wrote:
    > Hi,
    Snip

    ATA/IDE disks with DSP's have for several years have extra sectors that
    are used when bad areas are found by the DSP. When found the DSP moves
    the data to a spare sector and marks the bad sector (that is why you
    don't see error tables as you did on older drives like RLL ans MFM
    drives). If you see this it means that;
    1) The disk is dying (is smartd running?) (A good chance)
    2) There is a possibility of a virus. (Also a good chance since some
    viruses will mark a sector bad to hide themselves)
    3) All the spare sectors are in use. (See 1 above)
    4) The system caught an error before the hard drive DSP. (highly
    unlikely)
    5) Bad cable or transfer speed (unlikely)
    6) Some other ATAPI/IDE device malfunctioning. (possible)
     --
    jludwig <wralphie@comcast.net> 

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