[arch-general] [OT]Disk showing too many bad sectors - is it going to fail ?

[Partha Chowdhury]

On Sat, Oct 16, 2010 at 01:48:06PM +0100, Mauro Santos wrote:
> If you can, try overwriting the whole disk with dd, or test it with
> badblocks using the write and readback test and see if anything
> changes.
> The not so worst case is that you caught an impending disk faillure
> before it caused trouble and you already have a backup, the best case
> is
> that you find out those values are bogus and should not be taken into
> account.

i overwrote the whole disk with ddrescue -f /dev/zero /dev/sdb.After one
and a half hours later it stopped with the message "no space left on
device" - i guess it indicates no problem ?

i also tried the badblocks program with -w option. It took a long time
5+ hours but did not report a bad sector.

On Sat, Oct 16, 2010 at 12:17:50PM -0500, David C. Rankin wrote:
> There have been a number of firmware changes/updates for seagate
> drives over the
> past 3 years and several "bad runs" of disks. Check the seagate
> support site and
> make sure you have the latest firmware for your drive. I have had the
> bad sector
> errors - sometimes a true failure, sometimes not. Just backup, monitor
> and if
> you continue to get the errors, drop of $50 on a new 1T drive.
> 
I checked the seagate site and there is no firmware upgrade for this
model. On further googling, i found that seagate is only offering
firmware upgrades for 7200.12 model onwards.

Now to be absolutely sure, i downloaded the seatools program and it ran
a short and long test which both said PASSED.

Inspite of all these, gsmartcontrol shows the same.

What are the indications before a disk is going bad which a normal user
can catch with bare eyes and ears ?