Drive errors

[Emanoil Kotsev]

Mark Fraser wrote:

> On Friday 17 October 2008 18:58:37 Jim wrote:
>> Mark Fraser wrote:
>> > On Wednesday this week I started to get some errors on my /dev/sda1
>> > drive which is mounted as '/'. The first I knew there was a problem is
>> > when a program tried and failed to delete a file from /tmp because the
>> > drive had been remounted as read only. I then shut down and did a fsck
>> > on the drive which fixed a few problems.
>> >
>> > Now,however I'm getting thing like this in the logs:
>> >
>> >
>> > To me this looks like the drive is about to fail, am I right?
>>
>> Heres a article on how to see if your hard drive is on it's way out.
> 
>>
>> Now, run a quick health check:
>>
>> # smartctl -H -d ata /dev/sda
> 
> smartctl version 5.38 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen
> Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
> 
> === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
> SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
> 
>>
>> This is good news. One more quick check — read the drive's error log:
>>
>> #  smartctl -l error -d ata /dev/sda
> 
> I have errors there, but nothing that's new. However, I did receive the
> following email from smartd this morning:
> 
> The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon:
> 
> Device: /dev/sda, Read SMART Self-Test Log Failed
> 
> Emanoil, I haven't run badblocks yet, but I loaded up a live CD this
> morning and ran fsck.ext3 which didn't find anything wrong.
> 
> Also, I have done a backup of the majority of the drive, but if I was to
> copy everything to a new drive how do I make a bootable partition?

fsck checks the file system not the drive integrity

use parted or fdisk

I'm using fdisk usually. 

fdisk /dev/sdX

then here is a short howto but better read man page or type h to see the
help list after you've run fdisk
        p for print
        n for new
        h for help
        a for activate a boot partition
        w for write and quit

so the 'a' command will make your partition bootable

Of course manipulating the partition table will lead to all data to be lost

Next you have to install the boot (lilo, grub or whatever) loader on this
partition. Read the man page of the particular one to see how you can do
it.

usually using grub you do grub-install /dev/sdX etc.

regards