On Thu, 2004-09-23 at 15:39 -0600, Devlin Daley wrote: > I've been using a 80Gb laptop hardrive in a USB 2.0 external enclosure > for backups at work. I'm backing up a NAS Server running FC1. A backup > was started several days ago- and it never finished. The external drive > indicated it was busy, but the box wouldn't respond to any input > device. (Yes I did try ssh from across the network, still no love) > > I performed a hard reset and the main filesystem was easily recovered. > However, the external harddrive is having some substantial problems. I > tried fsck on the drive (/dev/sda1) and it reported that several inodes > were corrupted, but while attempting to correct them, the computer froze > entirely again. > > After rebooting fdisk reported that there were no partitions. I am not > trying to restore a backup but just trying to get the most recent data > onto the drive. I created a new partition, ext3 and mkfs happily > created the file system. However, I was able to mount the drive, but > when I tried writing data to it, yes, it froze again. > > I have the impression that perhaps some blocks have become corrupted on > the drive, but am not certain. I ran a utility called badblocks on the > device, which has not reported any errors yet, but it has been running > for over 3 hours now. (fortunately without freezing up) > > Is the hard drive toast if bad blocks are found? I thought that the > hard drive could keep track of bad sectors and just not write anything > to them, if so, how it is instructed to do so?
Yup. IDE drives internally keep a list of bad blocks, as well as spare blocks. As errors are detected, the drive automatically shuffles the bad blocks out of use and brings in the spares. By the time you see the bad blocks, the drive is out of spare good blocks. This means that failure is imminent. For what it's worth, just buy a new disk. They aren't that expensive these days. Furthermore, I'd highly recommend against backing up to a laptop drive. Besides being slow and expensive, I'd probably trust a 80 GB 3.5" disk over a 2.5" disk more. Another thing to try is to pull the drive and mount it on the IDE bus in an IDE computer (running knoppix perhaps). That way you can avoid potential problems with scsi errors over USB (bus stalls, etc). I once had a hard drive that failed in a weird way (similar to how you describe). I repartitioned the drive and formatted it to ext3. However after reboot, it was as if nothing I wrote to the drive stuck. It had reverted to it's old state, with a vfat partition! It was weird. But after it did it in several computers, I had to accept that the drive was faulty. :) Michael > > Any ideas? > > Devlin > > ____________________ > BYU Unix Users Group > http://uug.byu.edu/ > ___________________________________________________________________ > List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list -- ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
