[Wylug-help] Disk health monitoring

[John Hodrien]

On Thu, 26 May 2011, Anne Wilson 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
>
>
> Am I missing something or is this a buggy package?

You're jumping the gun with your SMART tests aren't you?

smartctl -t long /dev/sda

This *starts* an internal SMART test on the disk.  It doesn't return anything
meaningful straight away other than an estimate of how long it'll take (44
minutes in this case).

Wait that amount of time, then do:

smartctl -a /dev/sda

This'll then return something like this (snipped):

SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num  Test_Description    Status                  Remaining  LifeTime(hours)
LBA_of_first_error
# 1  Short offline       Interrupted (host reset)      80%     15763         -
# 2  Short offline       Interrupted (host reset)      80%     15763         -
# 3  Short offline       Completed without error       00%         0         -

If these tests fail, buy a new disk.

jh