"One or more disks are failing" ?

[Michael Schwendt]

On Sat, 4 Jul 2009 07:57:46 +0000 (UTC), Scott wrote:

> For a number of weeks now I've been getting this notification (only when 
> in Fedora 11 & running GNOME) that "one or more disks are failing".

What do you get for "smartctl --all /dev/sda"? Perhaps a non-zero and
growing number of reallocated sectors?

> But when I last went back to Fedora (then rawhide, now F11) it appeared 
> again. This only happens when running Fedora 11 in GNOME.

I can confirm that Fedora 10 doesn't warn about the same disk.

> My drive is exhibiting no odd behavior. It behaves as it should. I've had 
> drives fail many times in the past and this one is nowhere near leading 
> me to believe that a failure is eminent. 

Filesystems (see "man badblocks") and the hard-disk itself protect against
a first bunch of errors that can only be worked around by reallocating/ignoring
sectors. Until the hardware failures become fatal all of a sudden. Hence
an early warning can be helpful.