Re: IDE Hard Drive maintenance
This electronic message is not binding on its sender nor on Cetrel S.C. Any use of information of this mail except the use by the addressee within his or her business relation with Cetrel is strictly forbidden CETREL S.C. L-2956 Luxembourg; Tel: 00352 35566-1; http://www.cetrel.lu === Sorry for replying to such old mails, but I'm cleaning my mailboxes :-) Lauchlin Wilkinson wrote: I was wondering what most people on the list did when it came to keeping tabs on the health of IDE hard drives? I have a server in a remote location that I fear has one HD that is going flaky. Is there a way of doing a bad block scan on a mounted partition safely or am I asking the impossible. For monitoring, use SMART as in smartmontools (it's in unstable, but you can recompile easily for stable). It's a more advanced version of smartsuite in stable. Some things to watch out for: - enable SMART on your drives. Some may have it disabled by default. - enable automatic offline tests. These are non-destructive and non-captive, i.e. they can run in the background. On not-too-busy servers, this load on the disk should not be a problem. YMMV. Don't know whether it's the same for all disks, but I have one at home that does tests every 4 hours. - configure smartd to send email on problems. - have a watch on the SMART error log on the drives. If something apears in the logs, you will also see the block address in there, but it might not be obvious to associate that to a filesystem or devic block as you see it 'from the outisde'. You can run badblocks to find that info. Also be carefull when translating block numbers. badblocks will report filesystem blocks (thei size is in the superblock), the kernel log will show device blocks (i.e. 512-byte blocks), and something else I forget will show 1K blocks. Just be sure you get it right A trick to make disks with isolated read errors behave again (although you shouldn't trust them too much important data...) is to _write_ to those blocks. This will make the drive controller remap those bad blocks to good spare blocks. Bingo, errors disappeared. Until the next one appears :-) Cheers Michel -- Michel Lanners | Being able to break security PRO-SSC | doesn't make you a hacker [EMAIL PROTECTED]| more than being able to hotwire cars Cetrel S.C. | makes you an automotive engineer. 10, Parc d'Activite Syrdall | L-5365 Munsbach | Eric S. Raymond
Re: IDE Hard Drive maintenance
On Tue, Jan 07, 2003 at 02:31:33PM +1100, Lauchlin Wilkinson wrote: I was wondering what most people on the list did when it came to keeping tabs on the health of IDE hard drives? I have a server in a remote Apart from that you should install sensors to monitor your systems temperature, logcheck to let it mail you any anomalies and the usual bigbrother/netsaint/mon to watch services. bye, -christian- -- Christian HammersWESTEND GmbH - Aachen und Dueren Tel 0241/701333-0 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Internet Security for ProfessionalsFax 0241/911879 WESTEND ist CISCO Systems Partner - Authorized Reseller -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
IDE Hard Drive maintenance
Hi, I was wondering what most people on the list did when it came to keeping tabs on the health of IDE hard drives? I have a server in a remote location that I fear has one HD that is going flaky. Is there a way of doing a bad block scan on a mounted partition safely or am I asking the impossible. Cheers, Lauchlin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: IDE Hard Drive maintenance
On January 6, 2003 10:31 pm, the fabulous Lauchlin Wilkinson wrote: I was wondering what most people on the list did when it came to keeping tabs on the health of IDE hard drives? I have a server in a remote location that I fear has one HD that is going flaky. Is there a way of doing a bad block scan on a mounted partition safely or am I asking the impossible. I have recently (past 6 months) begun using ide-smart and hddtemp to monitor health of my IDE drives. I don't have it on a lot of systems yet so they have yet to aid me in detecting (hopefully pre-detecting) failures. I'd be very interested in hearing if anyone has successfully used these tools (or others) for predicting drive failures. This is from the ide-smart man page: ide-smart performs and queries the results of various non destructive tests on a SMART capable IDE DEVICE. You must have a BIOS and hardware that supports it. SMART stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology, which provides near future failure prediction monitoring different attributes (listed as Id) of the device. If a value of a particular Id (or attribute) is under a certain threshold, the device most probabily will be about to fail. This is from the hddtemp man page: hddtemp will give you the temperature of your IDE hard drive by reading Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T) informa- tion (on drives that support this feature). Only modern hard drives have a temperature sensor. hddtemp does not support reading S.M.A.R.T information from SCSI drives. -- Fraser real sig coming RSN -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
