unreadable sectors, what to do?

[Cameron Simpson]

On 11Oct2007 07:07, Neal Becker <ndbecker2 at gmail.com> wrote:
| I have a raid0 array, and I'm getting this:
|  Currently unreadable (pending) sectors detected:
|         /dev/sda - 48 Time(s)
|         2 unreadable sectors detected
|  
|  Offline uncorrectable sectors detected:
|         /dev/sda - 48 Time(s)
|         2 offline uncorrectable sectors detected
| 
| What should I do?  Run badblocks?

As remarked, replacement drives may be the cheap and experient approach.

But I will remark that my venerable laptop drive started doing this to
me some time ago.

Since it had a single ext3 filesystem I went:

  e2fsck -c /dev/sda

That ran badblocks, and told the fs to avoid those sectors.

And it's been fine since.

It took a whole day as I recall; once the scan hits the bad sectors
Linux stalls for a while retrying them before propagating the failure up
for badblocks to see. And of course I've lost some data somewhere.

The prudent thing is new media, and a more robust RAID (1, or 5 if
you've got enough $s and drive bays). The cheap but effictive thing,
if $s are short and you can stand the downtime, may be an "e2fsck -c".

You're still at risk of course, but since I don't believe that bad
sectors spread like a fungus I suspect you're not at much more risk than
you already are with RAID0. It may buy you a lot of time while accruing
$s and planning your storage upgrade.

Cheers,
-- 
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> DoD#743
http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/

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