[TriLUG] Failing hard drives (laptops)

[T. Bryan]

On Sunday 28 August 2005 08:49, Joseph Mack NA3T wrote:
> On Sun, 28 Aug 2005, T. Bryan wrote:
> > Speaking of failing hard drives, I have an old thinkpad T23 that has
> > started to lock up randomly.
>
> run smartd on it (http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/)
>
> presumably this will work on laptop drives.

Thanks.  I was able to run smartctl from Knoppix 3.9 on the drives.  I ran the 
short and long self-test (smartctl --test short and smartctl --test long).  
The log (smartctl -l selftest) shows that both of these (offline) self tests 
completed without error.

On the other hand, when I look at the error log (smartctl -l error), it shows 
the last five errors 
Error (17|16|15|14|13) at disk power on
UNC 45 sectors at LBA 0x01d563ba = 30761914.

The sector seems to correspond to the following messages in /var/log/messages 
on boot up.  So, now I'm trying to figure out whether I should just swap out 
the drive.  I've seen other stange behavior with this machine, and I'm not 
sure whether it's related to the hard drive.  

For example, when looking at the machine with Knoppix, I mounted the 
partitions to grab some data off of them.  One of them wouldn't unmount.  
lsof showed some command running (an "ls /var/log/" which would be showing 
files on Knoppix's in memory filesystem) whose cwd was on the mounted drive, 
but I was unable to kill that process.  It wouldn't complete.  The ls command 
wouldn't show the files that weren't even on the hard drive, but it wouldn't 
return, so it was holding onto the mounted partition via its cwd.  

Here are the messages I saw in /var/log/messages.  UncorrectableError doesn't 
sound good, but once the machine boots, it seems to run fine most of the 
time.  Of course, if this is the first sign of drive death, I'll replace it 
now.  It's my wife's machine, and I don't want to lose a single file between 
last backup and complete hard drive death.  :-)

kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=30761914, 
sector=53088                                              
kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev 03:05 (hda), sector 53088                                                                         
kernel: hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }                                                                  
kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=30761914, 
sector=53096                                              
kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev 03:05 (hda), sector 53096                                                                         
kernel: hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }                                                                  
kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=30761914, 
sector=53104                                              
kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev 03:05 (hda), sector 53104                                                                         
kernel: hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }                                                                  
kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=30761914, 
sector=53112                                              
kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev 03:05 (hda), sector 53112
kernel: hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=30761914, 
sector=53120
kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev 03:05 (hda), sector 53120
kernel: hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=30761914, 
sector=53128
kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev 03:05 (hda), sector 53128