Catastrophic disk failure, where was smartd?

[David G. Mackay]

On Thu, 2008-03-27 at 10:27 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Roger Heflin wrote:
> >That only catches 'hard' errors.  Modern drives have spare sectors and 
> the ability to remap soft errors internally, up to a point, before the 
> OS knows anything about them.  If the OS (or dd) sees an error, it means 
> you've used up the spares or the internal retries weren't able to fix 
> it.  The smart interface is supposed to let you know far along you are 
> in using up the internal correction and how often soft errors are hidden 
> by the retries.  It seems good in theory, and if it predicts the drive 
> is going bad you should probably believe it.  But, I think a lot of 
> drives fail faster than the internal corrections can handle so you often 
> don't get any warning.

Well, the diagnostic from Seagate indicates that the drive temp was 253,
but a smartctl -A /dev/hdbad showed a LOT of 253 values in the data.
I'm guessing that the drive electronics have gone bad.  It's still
sayonara for the drive, but it does help misenterpter the results.

Dave