[ale] harddrive errors

James P. Kinney III jkinney at localnetsolutions.com
Sun Jun 5 12:47:02 EDT 2005


On Sun, 2005-06-05 at 12:21 -0400, Chris Farris wrote:
> The 250G drive I bought last summer when Frys open started tossing the
> same errors last weekend. I'll never trust it again with vital data (I'm
> an unforgiving a-hole) but I hate to just toss it. I want to put it in a
> USB/Firewire enclosure and use it for swapping mp3s. 
> 
> Anyone know if running the lowlevel format tools will mark the new bad
> areas and allow this drive to be used again.

If it's bad sectors then it could still be used again after a badblocks
run. But the DriveReady Seek errors I've seen have been problems with
the drive being able to put the head in the right place. I am reasonably
sure that bad sector errors are different (but I could be wrong and my
wife can verify that :).
> 
> Thanks
> Chris
> 
> On Sun, 2005-06-05 at 11:48, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> > On Sun, 2005-06-05 at 11:22 -0400, John Wells wrote:
> > > James P. Kinney III said:
> > > > 1. Did you replace the IDE cable with a brand new, un-mangled one? IDE
> > > > cables have very fine wires that can't take being bent around much. The
> > > > 80 wire cables are quite fragile. They feel stiff mostly because of the
> > > > insulation. I believe the wire inside are around 30 gauge.
> > > 
> > > Ok...the IDE cable does appear a bit mangled, so I'm going to replace. 
> > > Power supply (350W) should be adequate.
> > > 
> > > After replacing the cable, how can I stress test it to see if any more
> > > errors occur?
> > 
> > Boot from a CD or floppy like Toms RootBoot or Knoppix. Generate a large
> > file (if you use Knoppix, copy the compressed image file to the hard
> > drive) and make another copy of it from the hard drive file. This will
> > force the system to do both reads and writes and exercise the head
> > motion with lots of Seeks. While you do this, have a shell open tailing
> > the systemlog file.
> > > 
> > > Thanks!
> > > John
> > > 
> > > _______________________________________________
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> > > Ale at ale.org
> > > http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
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-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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