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Date:      Sat, 18 Dec 2004 09:08:54 -0800
From:      Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org>
To:        Peter Jeremy <PeterJeremy@optushome.com.au>
Cc:        Gary Corcoran <garycor@comcast.net>
Subject:   Re: Multiple hard disk failures - coincidence ?
Message-ID:  <41C46426.3090900@elischer.org>
In-Reply-To: <20041218091739.GC97121@cirb503493.alcatel.com.au>
References:  <41C3D62D.7000808@comcast.net> <20041218091739.GC97121@cirb503493.alcatel.com.au>

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Peter Jeremy wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-Dec-18 02:03:09 -0500, Gary Corcoran wrote:
> 
>>I've just had *THREE* Maxtor 250GB hard disk failures on my
>>FreeBSD 4.10 server within a matter of days.  One I could
>>attribute to actual failure.  Two made me suspicious.  Three
>>has me wondering if this is some software problem...   (or
>>a conspiracy (just kidding) ;-) )
> 
> 
> Seems unlikely that faulty server software could cause a disk failure.
> One possibility is that your power supply is a but stressed and the
> supply rails are out of tolerance.  The other possibility is that the
> drives are overheating.  Higher density drives will be more sensitive
> to both heat and dirty power.
> 
> 
>> I suppose it
>>is possible these errors may have shown up more than a week or
>>two ago, because my windows machines, reaching them via samba,
>>haven't shown any problems until today, and of course with almost
>>750GB of data, it's not all accessed over a short time span.
> 
> 
> My approach to this is to add a line similar to 
>   dd if=/dev/ad0 of=/dev/null bs=32k
> for each disk into /etc/daily.local (or /etc/weekly.local or whatever).
> This ensures that the disks are readable on a regular basis.
> 
> 
>>P.S. I *can't* be the first person to run into this problem:
>>When one gets a "hard error" reported for a certain block number,
>>how does one find out exactly *which* file or directory is now
>>unreadable?  With hundreds of thousands of megabytes on one disk,
>>a manual search is not practical - somebody must have written a
>>program to 'backtrack' a block number to a particular file name
>>- no?
> 

I generally do a tar cf /dev/lubb  /mountpoint

We have some tools that do teh reverse..
tell you what blocks are in a file..
It should be possible to modify fsck to do the inverse..

fsck -n --findblocks 234234,56546,2342342

> 
> I know I've done this in the past but I don't recall exactly how.
> About all you can do is search through the inode list for the
> relevant blocks and then map the inode numbers to file names.
> 



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