HDD Failure of ‘07
Turns out that 320GB “cheap investment” saved me from losing a lot of important data, almost a year later I have lost my 250GB Seagate hard drive. Some data is still recoverable, but I can’t rely on faulty hardware and went ahead with badblock’s destructive write-mode test (-w).
Here’s a sample of dmesg, smartd, and badblocks’s output. They are all a pretty good warning signs of the impending hardware failure to come.
$ dmesg
[...]
hdb: task_in_intr: status=0×59 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Error }
hdb: task_in_intr: error=0×40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=170135808, high=10, low=2363648, sector=170135808
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
end_request: I/O error, dev hdb, sector 170135808
Buffer I/O error on device hdb, logical block 21266976
$ smart -d
Opened configuration file /etc/smartd.conf
Drive: DEVICESCAN, implied ‘-a’ Directive on line 23 of file /etc/smartd.conf
Configuration file /etc/smartd.conf was parsed, found DEVICESCAN, scanning devices
Device: /dev/hdb, opened
Device: /dev/hdb, not found in smartd database.
Device: /dev/hdb, is SMART capable. Adding to “monitor” list.
Monitoring 2 ATA and 0 SCSI devices
Device: /dev/hdb, 829 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors
Device: /dev/hdb, 829 Offline uncorrectable sectors
[...]
$ badblocks -wsv /dev/hdb
Testing with pattern 0xaa: done
Reading and comparing:
178003968
178003969
178003970
178003971
178003972
178003973
178003974
178003975
[...]
November 4th, 2007 at 11:04 pm
Now I’m curious. Did you back up your stuff every so often, or did you make a cron job to do it every night or so?
November 7th, 2007 at 9:20 pm
I have a cron job that runs a small bash/rsync script every night at 3am. Most data is lost because of human error, it’s not uncommon for me to `rm` something I shouldn’t have so the time lag proves to be helpful.