[Gllug] Badblocks indicates disc is OK?...

[Christian Smith]

On Tue, 10 Aug 2004, John Winters wrote:

>...or, "Do hard disc drives get better?"
>
>I suffered an apparent disc failure back in April.  The disc in question
>(200 Gb Maxtor) started giving i/o errors and I put the problem down to
>lack of ventilation.  Fortunately everything was backed up so I did
>first a short term fix (loading bits back onto different machines) and
>then at the start of the summer holidays I finally got around to
>replacing the failed server.
>
>I was about to throw away the failed disc and I just thought I'd test
>it.   I shoved it in a different machine, fdisk'ed it to create one
>large partition and then did:
>
>    mke2fs -c -c /dev/hdb1
>
>To my surprise the whole thing ran through (albeit taking *ages*) and
>didn't generate a single disc error.
>
>So, have I got a duff disc or not?


Always check cabling first. Luckily, modern ATA specs include CRC based
error detection, so bad cabling will only result in recognised data
errors, rather than bad data actually being read/written undetected. Older
ATA didn't even include parity error detection.

Keep some spare cables about to try, especially for transient errors.


>
>TIA,
>John
>
>

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