[NTLUG:Discuss] Troubling hard disk behavior

[Preston Hagar]

On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 11:19 PM, Leroy Tennison
<leroy_tennison at prodigy.net> wrote:
> Running SuSE 10.3 with a Seagate Barracuda ST3250620A drive.  Twice on
> boot up GRUB paused for a significant length of time at stage1 but
> eventually booted.  Today during the init scripts I got a time out
> waiting for one of the partitions to presumably mount.  I am running the
> smartd daemon.
>
> Running smartctl as root with -H reports "PASSED" for the drive and "-l
> error" states that there is no error log.  The current drive was
> purchased relatively recently when these tools presented a "drive
> failing" message to me one day.
>
> Any ideas as to what could be wrong?  Yes, I ***DID*** back up my data
> when these events took place...
>

One more thing you might use to test the drive would be HD Sentinel.

http://www.hdsentinel.com/hard_disk_sentinel_linux.php

The linux version is free.  What it does is take all of the SMART
information and give you an average, instead of a PASS/FAIL.  A lot of
times I have had it predict a drive on its way out while SMART still
said it was fine.  Apparently, SMART is fairly boolean that although
you could have a lot of bad sectors, high temps or other issues, as
long as no single issue is over the given threshold, then the drive is
considered a PASS.  Some of the thresholds can only be reached if the
drive actually fails!  HD Sentinel takes all of the SMART data and
uses an algoritim they came up with to create a score on a scale of
0-100 on the health of your drive.  This might give you a better idea
if your drive is having to remap a lot of bad sectors or has other
problems.

I know this isn't a exact reply to your question, but I just thought I
would share a really nice free tool I have found in terms of
monitoring drives.

Preston