Arch Linux

Carlwill

Member

From: Orlando, FL

Registered: 2008-10-06

Posts: 560

Website

Notification Of Disk Problems

Today on my new Arch Linux install, I was notified that one of my two SATA drives is reporting health problems. The "Disk Utility" is constantly popping up and it's just frustrating. When I examine the disk using the utility, it says the following:

"Disk has many bad sectors"

When I check mdadm, both drives appear to be working:

[cmennens@tuna ~]$ cat /proc/mdstat 
Personalities : [raid1] 
md2 : active raid1 sda3[0] sdb3[1]
      976068077 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU]
      
md1 : active raid1 sda2[0] sdb2[1]
      192704 blocks [2/2] [UU]
      
md0 : active raid1 sda1[0] sdb1[1]
      497971 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU]
      
unused devices: <none>

Can someone please help me and tell me how I can resolve this issue?

---

./

lucke

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2004-11-30

Posts: 4,018

Re: Notification Of Disk Problems

Use smartmontools to see what's up with your drive. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Smart

If you're getting (many) bad sectors, it's most prudent to replace your drive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_sectors

foutrelis

Developer

From: Athens, Greece

Registered: 2008-07-28

Posts: 705

Website

Re: Notification Of Disk Problems

You should be able to use Disk Utility to see how many bad/reallocated sectors the drive has.

You can either choose to replace the disk, or do the same as me and apply a patch to libatasmart to make it less "jumpy". I mean, I don't mind having a few reallocated sectors, as long as their number isn't increasing. See FS#24375 for the patch and more details.

Whichever way you choose to proceed with, always keep backups and make sure they're recent enough.