"One or more disks are failing" ?

[Alan Cox]

On Sat, 04 Jul 2009 16:07:18 -0700
Scott Beamer <geekboy at angrykeyboarder.com> wrote:

> On 07/04/2009 10:25 AM, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> > 
> > Drives typcially won't reallocate bad sectors if they can't get a good read
> > or the operation is a write. This is to give you a chance to recover the data
> > if you want to try. And if you want to spend some effort, you can figure out
> > what files, if any, were using these blocks.
> 
> Wouldn't checking for bad sectors (finding none) followed by formatting
> the drive eliminate this problem?

Most drives will reallocate a bad sector providing you write over it.
fsck will do this for problematic metadata (block counts, bitmaps, inodes
etc) if it has to.

For data hdparm --repair-sector offers a very low level interface. As
there is no easy way of finding out which file owns the problematic block
or how many there are and which files they are in without accessing that
bit of data a backup and restore is normally wise.

When ever possible I use raid 1 (mirroring). Drives are fairly cheap,
sizes are so big that capacity isn't a problem. Reliability without raid
isn't good enough IMHO.