From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Feb 21 15:25:28 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mired.org (dsl-64-192-6-133.telocity.com [64.192.6.133]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 2D61937B400 for ; Thu, 21 Feb 2002 15:25:25 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 72345 invoked by uid 100); 21 Feb 2002 23:25:24 -0000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15477.33252.197082.914224@guru.mired.org> Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2002 17:25:24 -0600 To: Robin Becker Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: hard disk errors In-Reply-To: <42557766@toto.iv> X-Mailer: VM 6.90 under 21.1 (patch 14) "Cuyahoga Valley" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ From: "Mike Meyer" X-Delivery-Agent: TMDA/0.46 (Python 2.2; freebsd-4.5-STABLE-i386) Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Robin Becker types: > In article <15476.2903.219792.310210@guru.mired.org>, Mike Meyer dated-1014670039.417d3e@mired.org> writes > >> What should I be doing? I have backups, but this is our cvs server and > >> messing around is not desirable. Does the boss need to splash out on a > >> whole new machine? > >Most likely, the drive is about to die, and the boss needs to splash > >out for a new drive. it might be the cable or motherboard, but it's > >unlikely to be one of those unless you've been mucking around inside > >the machine recently. > that's what I figured. When I was a lot younger there was something > called bad-blocking drives, but it seems that is hard to do with modern > eide drives. The trick as I remember it was to create some obscurely-named file, and use a program that tweaked the file system to put bad blocks into that file. You could still do that, but there's not a lot of point to it. Modern drives have blocks they don't tell you about, and will automatically switch to one of those when a write fails. So when you start seeing multiple hard errors, it means that all the reserved blocks are being used, your drive has lots of bad blocks on it, and is about to fail bigtime. http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message