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View Full Version : [SOLVED] Updated to ubuntu 9.10 Disk has many bad sectors



waleedakleh
November 24th, 2009, 05:14 PM
yesterday i updated ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10, after it finished i rebooted my pc,
after every login a message started to pop up by "gdu-notification-daemon" saying
a hard disks may be failing one or more hard disk report health problem. click the icon to get more information
so i clicked ok then clicked on the new hard disk icon on my panel with a "!" inside a yellow triangle, doing so "palimpsest disk utility" application comes up saying
Disk has many bad sectors!!!
i bought this hard disk 9 months ago, and never had any problems with it, till this moment.

so i wanted to ask could this "palimpsest disk utility" be wrong???
how can i be sure??
did anybody else had this problem??

note: i dont know if this matters but i have ubuntu on ext4, and i have windows xp and backtrack 4 on the same HD each on a partition
i read an other post and didnt get a full answer

IS IT A BUG???

thank in advanced :)

dddw
November 24th, 2009, 05:33 PM
I have the exact same issue!

howefield
November 24th, 2009, 05:36 PM
Take a second opinion using an utility from your hard disk vendors website.

phillw
November 24th, 2009, 05:38 PM
You can run fsck on the partition, firstly you need to unmount it. So, take a note of
fdisk -l to find the name of the partition

Then, it's follow this http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=833916&postcount=8

Should get you sorted.

Regards,

Phill.

ptn107
November 24th, 2009, 05:54 PM
It's a bug. I remember this from the karmic beta, but I thought it was fixed[1]. Guess not??

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libatasmart/+bug/438136

r_barndt
November 24th, 2009, 06:16 PM
I had the same issue when I upgraded to Karmic. It might be a bug, or it might be real, so check the details window to determine which errors are flagged and if the values seem in range. An extremely large value or a negative value would indicate the utility is not correctly interpreting the S.M.A.R.T. values from your brand of drive.

Based on information gathered from other threads on this topic, my opinion was that the Palimsest utility is overly sensitive to the metric of the "Reallocated sector count" and was incorrectly flagging my drive as too many bad sectors. Mine was at 68 on a 10-month old drive, but one that has been on 24/7. The threshhold was 140 so I was thinking that the message should not come up until that time. So I decided to take a wait-and-watch approach.

One week later the reallocated sector count jumped up to 280. Now I am convinced that this utility just saved my data. I installed a replacement drive but I am wondering if Western Digital is going to honor a warranty claim because of only the one metric that their proprietary utility does not flag as a failure. I suppose I can use it as a scratch drive or use rsync to mirror my live filesystem until it does fail, but I don't trust the drive to hold my valuable data.

waleedakleh
November 24th, 2009, 06:48 PM
is seagate seatools for windows a trusted Hard Disk tester for bad sectors???

presence1960
November 24th, 2009, 07:48 PM
is seagate seatools for windows a trusted Hard Disk tester for bad sectors???

As long as you have a Seagate hard disk that will be great. Download the bootable CD version iso, burn it to a CD and boot from it. Note: if you have AHCI enabled for your disks change them back to IDE in BIOS for the test, the Seatools will not detect AHCI enabled hard disks.

I had the same issue with a new 500 GB Seagate disk in Karmic. I ran Seatools bootable CD and Everest from windows and the disk was fine in both instances.

I wound up disabling that function (Palimpsest) which reports the disk failing message by going System > Preferences > Startup Applications and unticking Disk Notifications. This will prevent it from running at startup. If you ever need to run Palimpsest go System > Administration > Disk Utility, then you will get that message again.

P.S. run the Long Test from Seatools, if errors are found they will be corrected if possible.

waleedakleh
November 24th, 2009, 09:02 PM
i have a seagate
i executed the "long generic" test using the windows version and it passed it.
i even tried the windows "error-checking" tool and it passed it.
it must be a bug
unless the seatools bootable version is more reliable!!!

phillw
November 24th, 2009, 09:08 PM
Hi, I've just looked & there is a bug report for it over here ---> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libatasmart/+bug/438136

Get a launchpad login, pop on that it also affects you & you can track the bug progress.

Phill.

unclesamslair
January 7th, 2010, 07:56 AM
I had the same problem the moment I installed Ubuntu 9.10. I was using a partition of Xubuntu 9.10 and it never detected any malfunction. I don't know what any of this means so I'll just post it in hopes that someone will be able to tell form just the error values that this is just a bug in Ubuntu and that my hard drive is fine since I'm broke as hell and can't afford a new one.


5 Reallocated Sector Count
Warning Normalized: 97 Worst: 97 Threshold: 24 Value: 4915290

197 Current Pending Sector Count
Warning Normalized: 91 Worst: 91 Threshold: 0 Value: 10
Also, I have a Fujitsu Hard Drive for the Dell INspiron 1501 that's been running for 1.2 years if that's of any help.

emarkay
January 25th, 2010, 03:28 AM
Same issue here:
http://georgia.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1336267&page=2