Re: Hard drive checksum issue

[David <bouncingcats@gmail.com>]

On Mon, 18 Aug 2025 at 02:49, Charles Curley
<charlescurley@charlescurley.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Aug 2025 01:10:32 +0000 David <bouncingcats@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > Is there any way to tell the drive to recalculate the checksum? I
> > > don't see anything in the smartctl man page.
> >
> > Hi, internet search on the error message does find discussion of this,
> > including:
> >   https://www.smartmontools.org/ticket/347
> >   https://www.smartmontools.org/ticket/1884
>
> Thanks. I should have thought of that. Doh.

No problem.

> Neither of those is reassuring.

I found them reassuring, because Christian Franke is the primary developer
of smartmontools [1], and in the first bug above he wrote, 11 years ago:
"This is a harmless drive firmware bug which could be safely ignored."

and in the second bug above he wrote, 11 months ago:
"[it] is usually harmless. It does not affect any user data."

So that's more than a decade of "dont worry about it".

I guess you seek further clarification with either him or WD (as a recent
customer) if you are concerned about it. WD will probably tell you to use
some proprietary diagnostic tool though, not that freedom software
probably written by some communist :)

[1] https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/Team