[Wylug-help] Disk health monitoring

[Simon Greenwood]

On 26 May 2011 13:05, Anne Wilson <cannewilson at googlemail.com> wrote:

> Yesterday I was using my older laptop to test some live CDs.  During one of
> the tests a message popped up saying that my hard drive is failing as it
> has
> many errors.  Afterwards I did wonder whether it was actually seeing my
> hard
> drive - I don't know.
>
> Anyway, obviously testing it is needed.  I ran chkdsk under XP first - it
> found no problems.  Then I installed smartmontools under Fedora 13.  I have
> used it in the past and found it helpful.  However, this time either
> something
> is changed or it is letting me down.  All I see, if I run it in a root
> terminal, is the header telling me that the test is running and estimating
> the
> time of completion.  I don't get any disk information at all.  I tried
> sending
> output to a text file, in case it simply wasn't printing its findings, but
> that also only contains the header.
>
> The command I used was
>
> # smartctl -t long /dev/sda > /home/anne/Temp/smartctl.txt
>
> and the output I get is:
>
> smartctl 5.40 2010-10-16 r3189 [i386-redhat-linux-gnu] (local build)
> Copyright (C) 2002-10 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net
>
> === START OF OFFLINE IMMEDIATE AND SELF-TEST SECTION ===
> Sending command: "Execute SMART Extended self-test routine immediately in
> off-
> line mode".
> Drive command "Execute SMART Extended self-test routine immediately in off-
> line mode" successful.
> Testing has begun.
> Please wait 44 minutes for test to complete.
> Test will complete after Thu May 26 11:51:37 2011
>
> Use smartctl -X to abort test.
>
>
> The short test does rather better, with
>
> # smartctl -t short -H /dev/sda > /home/anne/Temp/smartctl.txt
> [root at anne-laptop ~]# cat /home/anne/Temp/smartctl.txt
> smartctl 5.40 2010-10-16 r3189 [i386-redhat-linux-gnu] (local build)
> Copyright (C) 2002-10 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net
>
> === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
> SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
>


That sounds like a false positive from one of the live CDs. SMART support is
rather patchy across distributions but Ubuntu certainly has it in Disk
Utility so try running from that. It could be something as simple as a few
bad sectors on the disk which would show as a SMART error but shouldn't
affect performance.

s/

>




-- 
Twitter: @sfgreenwood
"Is this your sanderling?"
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