Re: hard drive repair problem

[Florian Kulzer <florian@molphys.leidenuniv.nl>]

On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 12:35:30 -0400, Marty Landman wrote:
> At 11:40 AM 6/5/2006, Digby Tarvin wrote:
> 
> >Sounds more like a hardware fault than a filesystem corruption to me.
> 
> I was afraid of that.
> 
> >Have you checked to see if anything is being logged by the driver
> >(eg by checking the output of 'dmesg')?
> 
> Yes, dmesg shows the same thing that fsck does
> 
> i.e.
> 
> penskefile:/home/marty# dmesg | tail
> end_request: I/O error, dev 03:41 (hdb), sector 56
> hdb: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
> hdb: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=119, 
> high=0, low=119, sector=40
> end_request: I/O error, dev 03:41 (hdb), sector 40
> hdb: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
> hdb: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=119, 
> high=0, low=119, sector=48
> end_request: I/O error, dev 03:41 (hdb), sector 48
> hdb: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
> hdb: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=119, 
> high=0, low=119, sector=56
> end_request: I/O error, dev 03:41 (hdb), sector 56
> penskefile:/home/marty#
> 
> 
> >If it really is a filesystem corruption, then you should be able to dd
> >the entire content of the partition to /dev/null without any errors
> >being reported.
> 
> Ok does this result indicate a hardware error then?
> 
> penskefile:/home/marty# dd if=/dev/hdb1 of=/dev/null
> dd: reading `/dev/hdb1': Input/output error
> 40+0 records in
> 40+0 records out
> 20480 bytes transferred in 4.123283 seconds (4967 bytes/sec)
> penskefile:/home/marty#
> 
> 
> Sorry I'm quite ignorant of this kind of problem. Where can I go from here?

Modern hard drives have a built-in self-diagnosis system called SMART.
The corresponding Debian package is called "smartmontools". You can
install this package (or boot from a suitable live CD) and run

smartctl -a /dev/hdb | less

to retrieve the stored information. You can also run an extended
self-test with

smartctl --test=long /dev/hdb

Maybe that will give you an indication about the seriousness of the
problem.

Another thing to look at is "testdisk", which is a partition scanner and
disk recovery tool. I have never had to use it myself, but I have heard
good things about it. It cannot do anything, of course, if you really
have a permanent hardware failure. 

-- 
Regards,
          Florian