What is Ubuntu telling me?

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spider69

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I have downloaded Ubuntu 9.10 and while doing a live install, I saw a little pop up box with an exclamation mark I had a look and it seems to be a HDD health detector. Below are 2 print screens that had the errors on them. What do they mean and is it serious? Bear in mind that I recently had to reload Win XP and all other stuff because of a CHKDSK that wouldnt go away.
http://mybroadband.co.za/photos/showphoto.php?photo=13666&cat=500

http://mybroadband.co.za/photos/showphoto.php?photo=13668&cat=500

What is Ubuntu telling me?

FWTIW. 9.10 seems to be great and I am looking forward to using it a bit more.

Any help?
 
It says your HD is full of bad sectors. Usually not good.
 
Depends. Sometimes they are marked as 'bad' and the HD will no longer try to write to them. Other times it could be indicative of a potential failure.

Either way, backup your data.
 
I bought a 2.5" 320GB external at the beginning of this year and got the exact same message for that drive from Ubuntu 9.10. Windows is not complaining though. I'm looking into buying a new HDD to back my stuff up, don't want to risk losing it. I suggest you do the same. Then you can format it after you backed your data up. That might fix it. Not sure though. Better safe than sorry.
 
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Ubuntu is only reporting S.M.A.R.T data from your drive (which in 9.10 it does very effectively). I wouldn't just ignore it, but if you want a second opinion just run a copy of seatools or another hdd diagnostic and see what the results are there.
 
spider69 said:
Bad sectors? Is it terminal (for the HDD) or can it be "fixed"?
Click to expand...
100% Terminal.

When the drive does detect a bad sector, it tries to move the data to some spare space that it keeps handy for these things (what ponder said). If it succeeds, they fall under reallocated sector count. If it hasn't yet done that then they are classified as reallocation pending. However, if you look at the line below reallocation pending, you'll see that the drive has given up on reallocating the pending ones. That usually means that #1 Drive has run out of spare space to cover up the mess or #2 Sector mapping itself is failing #3 Can't read the "good" portions of the bad sector to be moved #4 Can't write the recovered data to the spare space. None of those scenarios are even remotely good.

By the time SMART & Self test detect a bad disk its usually already somewhere between dead and dying. Replace the disk & count yourself lucky if you get all your data off it.

timvdwest said:
but if you want a second opinion just run a copy of seatools
Click to expand...
Seatools does the same test: Short drive self test. It will probably flunk the drive anyway since it looks at SMART too.
 
Many thanks people. As I said I have been experiencing problems with the drive for some time and this looks like the straw that broke the camels back. Time for a new HDD.
 
Had a similar issue with my girlfriends laptop recently. Windows had been getting very sluggish so we thought we'd try Ubuntu on the machine. Immediately on the first boot Ubuntu reported that the disks were failing. Unfortunately WinXP has no native support for S.M.A.R.T so the system just blindly continued to use the disk even though it was failing.

Generally speaking a disk failure is a cascading effect. A single bad sector can often result in loose particles within the harddrive and these can collide with the read head or scratch the disk surface.

Don't play games with a failing drive. Replace it as soon as practically possible.
 
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