Re: [tlug] Potentially Dying Hard Disk Questions

["A. Sajjad Zaidi" <sajjad@example.com>]

Hi,

On Tue, Aug 03, 2004 at 08:09:48PM +0900, Zev Blut wrote:
> 
> The symptoms are:

All these look like typical symptoms of a hard drive going bad. Run
'dmesg' which should confirm this. If you see errors such as the
following:

"hda: timeout waiting for DMA"

then you probably have bad sectors on the drive.

> I am curious if anyone knows of any potential reasons why this disk
> would do the above? Could it be heat related, bad system
> configuration, BIOS, IDE cable or is it just a bad disk?

Hard drives are quite sensitive and can develop bad sectors from even
the slightest mishandling or accidents and sometimes just by being under
heavy use for a while. Almost all the drives I have owned have shown
some signs like these within two years.

To avoid this, you can try to be careful in handling them. No sudden
jerks and such. Install them so there is none or little vibration and
ample cooling.

Otoh,  I've seen drives survive drops from a few feet or being hit with
something heavy (like a hammer).

> Also, would there be any danger to the rest of the system if I left it
> in it with my new drive?  Of course, it is on the second IDE channel.

No danger in leaving it in there, but it might continue to slow down
your system if any data on the bad blocks is accessed.

One thing I've done with success is scanning the drive using badblocks
and telling the filesystem to avoid those blocks (not supported on all
fs). mkfs.ext[23] has an option to do this automatically.

You can also partition the drive in such a way that the bad blocks are
not used. I did this with a 45GB drive I had which had bad sectors at
the start and in the end. I'm using the middle ~30GB as a cache for my
proxy.

Still, bad blocks have a tendency to spread once they appear. Try to
only use the drive for unimportant/temporary data such as swap or cache.

-- 
A. Sajjad Zaidi
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