disk problems or false alarm??
Guolin Cheng
guolin at alexa.com
Fri Apr 30 20:54:12 UTC 2004
Hi, Alexander,
Thanks for your reply.
But in fact, I'm using Maxtor disk diagnosis 4.06 diskette offline for long time. I use it for drive connection test, and quick (90seconds) test. Then I boot the Linux failed machines into netRepair mode, to run "badblocks" programs on all 4 hard disks (/dev/hda, /dev/hdb, /dev/hdc, /dev/hdd) one by one to detect sector errors.
My only concern is, I have been using "hdparm -d1 -c3 -m16 -a16 -A1 -u1 -W1 -k1 -K1" command on all 4 PATA hard drives, to speed up disk access speed, and improve machines' responsiveness. All other options seems OK except "-u1", which, according to manual, may bring "massive filesystem corruption" (Although for 3 years I have seen no file system corruptions because of that). But if I don't enable the options, the Linux boxes will response way slow to keyboard when high-speed data transfer happens.
Any suggestions or hints are greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
--Guolin Cheng
-----Original Message-----
From: Alexander Dalloz [mailto:alexander.dalloz at uni-bielefeld.de]
Sent: Friday, April 30, 2004 12:46 PM
To: For users of Fedora Core releases
Subject: RE: disk problems or false alarm??
Am Fr, den 30.04.2004 schrieb Guolin Cheng um 21:01:
> Hi, jludwig,
>
> Thanks for your helpful information.
>
> Because I'm running Linux, so I assume there are no viruses. Then comes
> several questions:
>
> 1, How can I know whether all the spare sectors are in use and the disk
> will lose data, or it is just the beginning of disk failure?
>
> 2, How I can identify that the hard drive becomes dying at the first
> minute?
Use the drive sanity check tool by the drive manufacturer. Hitachi/IBM,
Maxtor, WD, they all have such a tool.
> 3, How to identify the malfunctioning hard drives? Should I idle the
> machine and test hard drives one by one to figure it out? Mostly it is
> the faiure-reporting hard drive failed, but I remember for sure, in a
> few cases, other alternative hard drives failed instead.
hda = master on primary controller
hdb = slave on primary controller
hdc = master on secondary controller
...
> 4, Should I replace hard drives when I first see this kind of disk error
> messages in case data begin to lose?
First check its state with a tool and other facts like cables. Very old
hard drives can only have problems with DMA. You may use hdparm to check
drive's setup.
> Thanks a LOT...
>
> Guolin Cheng
Alexander
--
Alexander Dalloz | Enger, Germany | GPG key 1024D/ED695653 1999-07-13
Fedora GNU/Linux Core 1 (Yarrow) on Athlon CPU kernel 2.4.22-1.2188.nptl
Sirendipity 21:41:36 up 3 days, 20:30, load average: 0.45, 0.64, 0.66
[ Γνωθι σ'αυτον - gnothi seauton ]
my life is a planetarium - and you are the stars
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