[TriLUG] HD failure eminent?

[Scott G. Hall]

The most common problem with harddrives that have been used a while is
misalignment.  As the actuator mechanism wears, it positions the heads
slightly out of alignment from the original formatting marks recorded
at the last low-level format.

I have "reconstituted" quite a number of ailing drives with the following:
a) Backup all data and programs -- preferably using an image backup
    (the 'dd' command is great at this)

b) Run an appropriate low-level format utility: SCSI drives can use the
    SCSI adapter's on-board utility for this (take an older-MS-DOS bootable
    floppy with "debug.com" on it; at the debug prompt jump to the SCSI
    interactive BIOS:  g=c800:6  (or try g=c800:0, g=c800:5 and some other
    start points)); IDE drives can use an older version of OnTrack's Disk
    Manager software (again in MS-DOS -- sorry).

    Jeremy and others -- feel free to point out Linux equivalences!

c) Either mount the drive in another machine and perform a high-level
    format (creating partitions and filesystems) and restore the backup,
    or reinstall Linux minimally and then restore your backup.  (I am not
    sure what special flags may be required to overwrite the booted-to
    root partition; I have not had to do this in Linux yet, but in Solaris
    and UnixWare you can boot to a "floppy-based" version that creates a
    RAM-disk and runs a small OS from there, whereby the harddisk can then
    be mounted and unmounted at will, and dd and cpio are available.)

    I have seen quite a number of really-small Linux distros described
    at DistroWatch.Com that fit on a floppy, zip drive, credit-card sized
    CD, or even on a USB microdrive that have dd, cpio and other harddisk
    diagnostics utilities on them.

Under Solaris and UnixWare I have breathed life back into quite a number
of failing harddisks this way.

Of course there is a lot to be said about a new harddisk, being as cheap
as they are now.  Who wants to fix a 2GB drive when you can afford a new
40GB to replace it?

On 12/17/2004 01:40 PM, Len Boyle <Len.Boyle at sas.com> wrote:
> Hello Brian
> 
> You might want to go to this site: http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/
> 
> Download the SeaTools Desktop Diagnostic tools. This tool should tell you
> if the disk is bad and if still cover by the warranty makes out the return
> form for you. Note requires windows create a bootable diagnostic floppy
> diskette.
> 
> len
> 
> On Fri, Dec 17, 2004 1:05 PM, Brian Henning wrote:
>> Hi List, Someone mentioned that my HD might be on its way out, in
>> response to the strange errors I described earlier.  So I went and ran
>> some SMART tests, and they all came back negative..  but the general SMART
>> stats looked kind of iffy, so I wanted to post them here and find out if
>> anyone had any comments, since I really don't completely know what I'm
>> looking at here.  Some of the numbers seem high, but I don't know whether
>> high is good or bad..   :-P 

--
Scott G. Hall
Raleigh, NC, USA
ScottGHall at BellSouth.Net