Smartd message: What does it mean?

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Sat, Oct 29, 2005 at 19:00:54 -0600,
  Charles Curley <charlescurley at charlescurley.com> wrote:
> 
> However, the fact that the drive has enough bad sectors that the
> firmware is reporting them to you means that you have more bad sectors
> than there were on the drive since it was manufactured. Your drive is
> warning you that it is about to die.

I don't think so. The sectors were reported as pending. This just means that
the disk can't get a good read. It won't throw away data on its own. The
person affected needs to give up on getting data off the sectors and rewrite
them, at which point they should be reallocated. If he looks at the output
of smartctl -a, he should be able to tell what how many sectors have been
remapped and very roughly how many more spares are available.