Is this PC doa? (was a formatting question)

[Basil Chupin]

On 16/11/2010 17:00, Mark wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 9:07 PM, Basil Chupin<blchupin at iinet.net.au>  wrote:
>    
>>      
> :
>    
>> When a failure is anticipated by S.M.A.R.T., the drive is typically
>> replaced and returned to the manufacturer, who uses these failed drives
>> to discover where faults lie and how to prevent them from recurring on
>> the next generation of hard disk drives.
>>
>> There lies the tale. Your HD(s) are failing.
>>
>>      
> Probably yes, maybe no.
>
> I just replaced a Seagate HD after more than two years of getting a
> message from the SMART firmware every 30 minutes without missing a
> single one, telling me that there were 2147483647 unrecoverable hard
> errors.  When I first noticed this I was alarmed until I realized that
> this is decimal for 0x7fffff, the likelihood of accuracy being about
> that to 1 against.  I obtained Seagate's seatools and verified that
> the disk was in fact just fine.
>
> Now, this does *not* mean your drive is healthy.  I would get a second
> opinion before ditching it, and quickly in case it is going bad.
>    

When I was running openSUSE there was an app called something line 
smart-tools or close to this. I had it installed and running.

While my HDs did not display the SMART error message as the OP stated, 
knowing that my HDs were some years old I kept an eye on the smart-tools 
log file almost on a daily basis. The log file showed me that the HDs 
were developing bad sectors on a daily basis - and which, of course, the 
system was taking care of by 'moving ' the affected data to new sectors.

And just to add to your comment, I also ran the Seagate 'SeaTools' 
against the HDs and was informed that there was absolutely nothing wrong 
with the HDs. But the bad sectors kept increasing....

BC

-- 
A man kept complaining about not having shoes to wear - until he saw a man with no legs.