Is there room for improvement in rescue mode? (was Re: Goodbye, Fedora)

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Thu, Feb 22, 2007 at 21:34:24 +0000,
  "Keith G. Robertson-Turner" <fedora-gmane.00003 at genesis-x.nildram.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> 10) Only other thing I can think of is, SMART disk health checks,
>     however, according to Google's recent report (they did a massive
>     test), SMART is next to useless at actually predicting failure.

That wasn't what they concluded. What they found is that something like half
of the disk drive failures occured that were ot detectable by smart.
The also found that disk drives that had even one reallocated block, had
a 10 times higher chance of failing over the next 60 days compared to
disk drives that had no reallocated sectors. There were one or two other
smart attributes where a single event had a similar correlation with
drive failures.