Disk failure detected by Ubuntu.

[Paul Tader]

NoOp wrote:
> On 11/13/2009 01:04 AM, Andrew Farris wrote:
>> On Thu, 2009-11-12 at 23:11 -0600, Paul Tader wrote:
>> [snip]
>>> - Notebook BIOS didn't report anything.
>>> - Windows didn't report anything (maybe if I could get to the event
>>> viewer before it locked up)
>>> - Ubuntu (using the Palimpsest utility) saw it right away and reported
>>> it to the user.
>> I actually just recently had a very similar experience with a laptop we
>> were fixing for a friend. It had vista on the laptop, and it had stared
>> locking up and crashing (more than usual) along with general crap
>> performance (worse than typical vista), and the laptop battery was dying
>> really fast, and the laptop itself was unusually hot. I suspected
>> hardware, as from the software side, everything looked normal... 
>>
>> First thing I did when I got a hold of it was I stuck a karmic LiveCD in
>> there, and sure enough the drive was going bad at a rapid pace. We
>> managed to back up all his info just in time, as on the very next boot
>> the hard drive got super-hot and started clicking. 
>>
>> My personal opinion is that Palimpsest is probably one of the most
>> useful additions to ubuntu I've seen in a long while, and I can't wait
>> to see what they follow up with!
>>
> 
> Just be aware of false positives:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libatasmart/+bug/438136
> [palimpsest bad sectors false positive]
> and
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-disk-utility
> 
> But certainly worth checking out the drive with other (manufacturer?)
> utilities as well.
> 
> 
> 
Yea, after Ubuntu indicated a bad drive I ran the manufactures Disk
repair "suite" and it also reported a bad drive, not as quickly, but
eventually it did report.

(Oh boy, one of the bug report posters has the same drive.  Hope they
doubled checked.)

Hitachi tool I used:

Drive Fitness Test
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm#DFT