"One or more disks are failing" ?

[stan]

On Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:12:47 -0600
Robin Laing <Robin.Laing at drdc-rddc.gc.ca> wrote:

> I am also seeing this on drives that are only a few months old.  I
> was having system crashes so I wouldn't be surprised about the need
> to re-allocate blocks.
> 
> Now the question that I pose is, how do get these blocks
> allocated/moved that is safe for data on the drives?  What is the
> best method to get these blocks allocated?
> 
> Can badblocks be used?
> 
> 
I have a drive that seems to have some bad sectors, that have been bad
since new.  It has been flagged for years by various programs, and is
still running.  I don't trust it with valuable data, but I use it.

I used   e2fsck with -c -c -k   (the double -c tells it to do a non
destructive read write test, the -k says to preserve existing bad blocks
and add any new ones) on the drive. It seemed to work, at least I didn't
lose any data that I could tell and the number of bad sectors has
remained stable since. This is very slow as it is reading, writing, and
reading every byte on the drive. Of course, the drive has to be
umounted as well.

The man page for e2fsck has all the options and what they do.  Verbose
might be advisable as well.

Of course, maybe I'm just fooling myself and this is strictly placebo
effect.  :-)