HDD errors - unrecovered read error - auto reallocate failed

[kajencik]

I'm running Fedora 10 and keep getting this error:


ata4.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x1 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
ata4.00: irq_stat 0x40000008
ata4.00: cmd 60/08:00:81:12:9c/00:00:2e:00:00/40 tag 0 ncq 4096 in
res 41/40:00:84:12:9c/76:00:2e:00:00/40 Emask 0x409 (media error) <F>
ata4.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
ata4.00: error: { UNC }
ata4.00: configured for UDMA/133
sd 3:0:0:0: [sda] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE,SUGGEST_OK
sd 3:0:0:0: [sda] Sense Key : Medium Error [current] [descriptor]
Descriptor sense data with sense descriptors (in hex):
72 03 11 04 00 00 00 0c 00 0a 80 00 00 00 00 00
2e 9c 12 84
sd 3:0:0:0: [sda] Add. Sense: Unrecovered read error - auto reallocate failed
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 781980292
ata4: EH complete
sd 3:0:0:0: [sda] 976773168 512-byte hardware sectors (500108 MB)
sd 3:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
sd 3:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
sd 3:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO


It show only one sector again and again, and also on the second HDD there is a very similar problem that one sector cannot be read, I'm not sure how serious this is, the HDD's were bought at the same time, they are same brand and type.

According to smart diagnostics. One drive has 1 pending sector and no offline uncorectable or realocated, the other one has 12 pending and 11 offline uncorrectable

They are both WDC WD5000AAKS-00A7B0 - 500GB capacity. Do you think this means I have to replace them (fortunatelly they are still under warrany)? It would be really a pain in the neck, because i really don't have spare 1TB drive to backup my data :(

IMHO the problem would be solved by reallocating the sectors manually somehow...? I think I did that in the past, but I'm not sure how...

I've searched the internet a lot but I don't see a exact solution and I'm not sure how to proceed.

[SlowJet]

http://support.wdc.com/warranty/index_end.asp?lang=en

It probably means the extra sectors are already used so yo have none left.
An bought at the same time, same MFG batch, same firmware, same bug.

I think you can have 30 days if you use a credit card to ship next day to get, install the new drives (one at a time, taking the one old out, putin one new cloing the f/s, test the new, take out new and old set 1, put back old 2, new two, clone and test, take out set2 and put new 1 and new 2 in correct places, test.

Then pack up the old and ship them back as per RMA info allowing one week before 30 days are up.
So you should have at least 10-12 days to swap the drives and data.
When your old drives are checked in at WDC shipping, the credit card thing is canceled.
FYI: ship out on Thursday or Friday, the truck doesn't stop on the weekend but the shippers might.

SJ

[observer]

http://www.google.com.mx/search?q=smartmontools+pending+sector&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:es-AR:official&client=firefox-a

if you can't recover the sector sometimes running shred with a zero pass on the entire disk does the trick no need to replace the drive but make sure to backup your data

[SlowJet]

http://www.google.com.mx/search?q=smartmontools+pending+sector&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:es-AR:official&client=firefox-a

if you can't recover the sector sometimes running shred with a zero pass on the entire disk does the trick no need to replace the drive but make sure to backup your data

Bad Hardware can not be fixed with software.
If the disk tests from the WDC RMA process indicate it is bad, then he should absolutely get a new disk (which will be a refurbished disk, fully tested.)

SJ

[kevmif]

Bad Hardware can not be fixed with software.
If the disk tests from the WDC RMA process indicate it is bad, then he should absolutely get a new disk (which will be a refurbished disk, fully tested.)

SJ

Precisely.

Run a full disk check - if its faulty then RMA it.

The WD RMA process is quite good. Only had to use it once thankfully.

[kajencik]

Hello guys, thanks for advices... I'm afraid the warranty trick wouldn't work for me here, as I'm located in the Europe, and they have 30 days to do the warranty repair/replacement. I ended up reinstalling fedora, without lvm, only using fdisk to divide the disk into partitions and it works great now! those errors are not anymore there, even with extensive disk usage (I'm running vmware server with about 240GB of virtualized storage, and creating two files needed for this, 120GB each, really puts some load on the hdds...).

What I'm suspecting is a dmraid (linux driver for intel fake raid) which I was using, but abandonded a while ago, because it was not what I was expecting (I say no more to these fake bios raids without hardware support!!, next time a would choose only a linux software solution for this or hardware raid.)
I've seen remains of this driver some times and I think it may have messed up with the common SATA driver...