Drive problems, fsck then what?

[Charles H. Gilley]

Okay, I went out and bought the book recommended by some in here for Unix
admin. Now I find myself with a cantankerous (sp?) disk drive. It
reports a few problems via fsck, then starts complaining loudly about
read errors in assorted locations. From a h/w perspecitve, I think this
drive is dieing. However, someone with far more experience than I told
me to reformat and rebuild and all will probably be well. The reformat
should mark the various bad locations so that the OS would stay away from
them.

Comments? Suggestions?

Thanks,

chg

[Scott Swigart]

You could use "uerf" to determine what blocks are bad, then use "scu"
to reassign those bad blocks.

SS

[D. Gerasimatos]

In article <4ufs2t$j...@peach.america.net>,

Charles H. Gilley <gilley@atl1> wrote:
>Okay, I went out and bought the book recommended by some in here for Unix
>admin. Now I find myself with a cantankerous (sp?) disk drive. It
>reports a few problems via fsck, then starts complaining loudly about
>read errors in assorted locations. From a h/w perspecitve, I think this
>drive is dieing. However, someone with far more experience than I told
>me to reformat and rebuild and all will probably be well. The reformat
>should mark the various bad locations so that the OS would stay away from
>them.
>
>Comments? Suggestions?

In my opinion, toss the drive and get a new one. The drive is probably
still under warranty even. Why would you mess with a disk that is
acting up? It has been my experience that once blocks start going bad
the process continues. You may be able to use the drive for awhile,
but why would you risk it? I wouldn't use the drive for anything mission
critical anymore. That is, I'd never use it as a boot disk or put
anything other than scratch data on it. Maybe you can use it for swap
even. When this happens to me, I send the disk back to the manufacturer
and get a new one.

Dimitrios

[Ian Goddard]

Charles H. Gilley wrote:
>
> Okay, I went out and bought the book recommended by some in here for Unix
> admin. Now I find myself with a cantankerous (sp?) disk drive. It
> reports a few problems via fsck, then starts complaining loudly about
> read errors in assorted locations. From a h/w perspecitve, I think this
> drive is dieing. However, someone with far more experience than I told
> me to reformat and rebuild and all will probably be well. The reformat
> should mark the various bad locations so that the OS would stay away from
> them.
>
> Comments? Suggestions?
>

> Thanks,
>
> chg

How valuable is the stuff you propose to put on the disk? How does that
compare with the cost of a new disk? Do you want to risk the prospect
that you're right and the other guy is wrong?

Ian

[Don Joy]

I would run the "diskdefect" utility.

Charles H. Gilley wrote:
>
> Okay, I went out and bought the book recommended by some in here for Unix
> admin. Now I find myself with a cantankerous (sp?) disk drive. It
> reports a few problems via fsck, then starts complaining loudly about
> read errors in assorted locations. From a h/w perspecitve, I think this
> drive is dieing. However, someone with far more experience than I told
> me to reformat and rebuild and all will probably be well. The reformat
> should mark the various bad locations so that the OS would stay away from
> them.
>
> Comments? Suggestions?
>
> Thanks,
>
> chg

--
Don Joy
System Administrator
SooNet Corp.

[Andreas Klemm]

Charles H. Gilley (gilley@atl1) wrote:
: Okay, I went out and bought the book recommended by some in here for Unix

[...]

BTW, your 'From:' doesn't comtain a FQDA (Full Qualified Domain Address).

And you could perhaps say, on what OS you are working on ;)

Andreas ///

--
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Andreas Klemm ___/\/\/ Support Unix -- andrea...@wup.de
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[jennifer]

I just went through this. HP dialed into my system, checked out the disk
then suggested that I rebuild the file system using newfs and
restoring the data from our backup tape. -- HP's drives normally last a
long time. If you are using HP and LVM with 9.04 there are some patches
that you may want to get. From what I understand 9.04 LVM has a few small
problems which may cause a file system to become corrupt. No real proof
though just a rumor.

Charles H. Gilley <gilley@atl1> wrote in article
<4ufs2t$j...@peach.america.net>...

> Okay, I went out and bought the book recommended by some in here for Unix

> admin. Now I find myself with a cantankerous (sp?) disk drive. It