I think one of my drives is on its way out, tho I've never seen a drive fail like this before. Drive is a year old WD 640G & I use it as my system drive. Via SMART, I've been doing daily short & weekly long tests since I installed it. Starting last week I woke up to my keyboard lights blinking and the sound of the heads thrashing & the drive repeatedly attempting to spin up. On my desktop the mouse was still moving but any command (dmesg, less /var/log/messages) resulted in an IO error. I restarted the computer and everything came up fine. I dug through the logs but there were no IO errors of any sort to be found. All I could see was that the extended SMART test successfully started (from smartd.log):
Jun 6 03:10:31 void smartd[5056]: Device: /dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD6400AAKS-22A7B0_WD-WMASY0830809, starting scheduled Long Self-Test. But then it failed to complete (from smartctl -a): # 7 Extended offline Interrupted (host reset) 50% 7699 - None of the other SMART attributes indicate any other potential. I used my computer with no problems all week thinking perhaps it was a fluke. This morning I woke to an similar situation as last week. The smartd log indicated that the extended test had started, but oddly enough smartctl has no record of the test starting. I'm going to purchase a replacement drive today. My data is backed up but the entire system is not, if it completely failed I'd need to do a re-install & would prefer to avoid that. I understand SMART can't detect every sort of drive failure, is this possibly one of those situations? I'd like to get the manufacturer to replace the drive, but I suspect I'll need something more concrete than a 'failed extended SMART test' to convince them of this. Any suggestions? At the very least I'll be giving it a couple passes of badblocks -vw. Wil
