Re: OT: Damaged harddisk and/or disk controller - ps
Kjetil Kjernsmo wrote:
On torsdag 20 oktober 2005, 01:27, Marty wrote:
It could be a spin-up problem due to a worn out motor.
Right. It is actually something like that that's my primary suspect.
This would
probably be reported by smartctl from the package smartmontools.
Ah, thanks for the pointer!
Got the daemon installed now, and did a run, I'm seeing these errors:
Error 149 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 1024 hours (42 days + 16
hours)
When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was in an
unknown state.
Error 148 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 1024 hours (42 days + 16
hours)
When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was in an
unknown state.
Error 147 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 1017 hours (42 days + 9
hours)
When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was in an
unknown state.
Error 146 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 1017 hours (42 days + 9
hours)
When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was in an
unknown state.
Error 145 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 1017 hours (42 days + 9
hours)
When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was in an
unknown state.
Does that mean anything to you....?
That looks familiar. In my case it also warned of imminent drive failure,
smartctl -H indicated that the disk was failing, and the BIOS SMART function
warned about the disk. Swapping out the power supply seems to have cleared
up all problems and the disk now passes all tests. Of course there's a chance
your drive motor could really be failing.
It's also possible that your power supply can't handle the powerup
surge, and this can also mimic the motor spin-up problem. I've
recently had this problem. Try swapping the power supply, preferable
with a more powerful one.
OK, it could be, but I put my hand in there last night after Alvin's
post, and again this morning after power-up, and the PSU is cool, so it
is nothing to indicate it is over-heated, at least. Furthermore, it is
a 340W PSU, which should, according to spec, give more than enough
power for my system, unless it is something wrong with it, of course...
Surge performance has nothing to do with steady state power or heat
dissapation. It's the ability to handle transient loads, and depends
mostly on the quality of the design and components in the power supply.
It may also be related to component aging or other degradation of the
power supply.
Is there any way I can measure the actual consumption?
You probably need a storage scope and current probe. The best way is an
inductive probe but that will probably be hard to find, and/or expensive. The
quick and dirty way is to use a low value (~1Ohm) high power resistor calibrated
against a measured 12V DC source, in series with the drive as it spins up.
The storage scope measures the surge voltage across the resistor. This approach
obviously has the drawback of increasing the voltage sag caused by the surge,
so the smaller the resistor value the better.
If you lack the test equipment, you might try to somehow use the motherboard 12V
voltage sensor, if it's fast enough to catch the transient. That takes some
imagination and effort.
It would be
interesting from several perspectives. I don't have a more powerful PSU
available, and the cost of that means it gets even harder to decide
what is the right thing to do... Since I need a larger disk anyway...
If it's the power supply, then you may need to retire it anyway.
Cheers,
Kjetil
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