"One or more disks are failing" ?

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Sat, Jul 04, 2009 at 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?

That depends on how you checked for bad sectors. Note that reformatting
doesn't write over the whole drive. If you really want to write the whole
drive as a test, you want to use dd to copy over /dev/zero or use the
badblocks program.

> That's what I had done and within a few days I started getting warnings
> again.

It's a very bad sign to be continously getting new bad sectors. If you get
a single burst of bad sectors at once it might be a problem local to part
of the disk and it might be worth continuing to use the disk depending
on your specific situation. (Though if your warranty allows you to RMA it,
that would probably be best.)