I think my hard drive is dieing...

WastingBody · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 09 May 2008 Posts: 105

This morning when after I logged into my desktop I started hearing this little "werring" sound going on and off every now and then. After I turned my computer off, I can no longer boot to that hard drive. I get read errors and the like. Now I am booted into the system rescue cd and am currently using rsync to copy all of my important files to my netbook. The drive mounts fine, the rsync operation is working perfectly. I haven't run a filesystem check or anything just in case there is a chance of something going wrong and I lose something. Is there anything that I should know? Anyone have any advice?

The worst part of this whole failure is that I just bought a 1 TB drive for my other computer to host backups the day before this all happened. I have never done backups before simply because I never had anything to put them on. Just very rotten luck on my part.

Ken69267 · Posted: Sat Jan 02, 2010 12:06 am Post subject:

well, I'd backup everything that you can and then asking what S.M.A.R.T. reports. sys-apps/smartmontools is the smart package in gentoo and `smartctl -a /dev/yourdevice` will tell you a good bit of info about it.

(I believe the system rescue cd has smart on it)
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WastingBody · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 09 May 2008 Posts: 105

I'm not really sure what to make of the output.

Vorlon · Posted: Sat Jan 02, 2010 1:02 am Post subject:

I think that disk is hosed. It probably has a bad boot sector, which is why you can access it but not boot to it.

Get as much off of it as you can.

if you're very brave (foolish?) you can try to repartition it after you have gotten all your data, but I'd get rid of the disk.
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Ken69267 · Posted: Sat Jan 02, 2010 1:10 am Post subject:

it doesn't look like a mechanical failure tbh. It reports PASSED and the attributes are all sane. (if the VALUE value is less than or equal to THRESH its failing)

After you've backed up might try to scan for badblocks and fsck.

EDIT: I'm almost positive its a badblock as

WastingBody · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 09 May 2008 Posts: 105

I think I've backed everything up that I need including my make.conf and my kernel's .config. I am brave and foolish, so I think I'll just try a reinstall and see what happens.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Jan 02, 2010 1:27 am Post subject:

WastingBody,

Get ddrescue (without the hypen) and manke an image of the drive to a file on your nice shiny new 1Tb drive
ddrescue tries really hard to recover your data and will only halt on success.

The SMART data looks ok and your drive only has just over 10,000 running hours, so its not even middle aged.

When you have your image, run the vendors test software on the disk. Thats a download from the website.
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

WastingBody · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 09 May 2008 Posts: 105

I'm running the SeaTools diagnostics tool from Seagate. I'm running the long test; it has found 10 errors so far. I hope it fixes it and I won't be left with a broken hard drive. On a good note my drive is still covered under its warranty, so if it does completely die soon I can have it replaced.

I think I'll keep ddrescue in mind if something else happens. I'll skip on it this time because all that's left that I haven't backed up is my root partition. I can easily rebuild my Gentoo install.

Ken69267 · Posted: Sat Jan 02, 2010 2:25 am Post subject:

I doubt the drive is totaled, it's got better vitality attributes than my drives at the least

.

Going on 150 reallocated bad blocks on mine, yours has zero (soon to be one once you fix the current one).
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WastingBody · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 09 May 2008 Posts: 105

SeaTools reported that it had fixed the bad blocks. I try booting to my drive. It runs a fsck on my home partition, but it fails saying something about unexpected inconsistency and dumps me out to the console with a read-only filesystem. Should I try to fsck from the system rescue cd? If I do what options should I use to check with if any?

On another note large file support was causing me a little pain on new server. I was unable to mount my ext4 partitions for a little while because of the default options of mkfs.ext4.

I'm editing this post from my now alive desktop. Thanks everyone!

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Jan 02, 2010 12:47 pm Post subject:

WastingBody,

Those 10 errors will be bad blocks that Seatools forced to be relocated by writing to the blocks.
Your data that was there will be lost. Smartmontools should show a non zero reallocated sector count.

Its a little worrying that the drive does not reallocate sectors while it can still read them, as its supposed to.
Its worth poking Seagate about that, as this problem will happen again.
This is the second incident like this, concerning a Seagate drive on the forums over the past week or so.

Seagate probably know about it and there may be a firmware upgrade for your drive to fix it.
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

WastingBody · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 09 May 2008 Posts: 105

There were no firmware updates for my drive. :/

If this problem progresses would it be a wise decision to go ahead and replace the drive?

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Jan 02, 2010 2:25 pm Post subject:

WastingBody,

email Seagate about the issue. Sectors do die as the drive is used and the drive is supposed to remap them to spares while it can still read the data. The issue will recur.

I would press seagate for a warranty replacement now - before you lose any more data.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

WastingBody · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 09 May 2008 Posts: 105

Alright, thanks again. ^_^