[mythtv-users] Seagate Lockups (was libraries over 8TB)

Alex Butcher mythlist at assursys.co.uk
Sat Jul 14 07:31:16 UTC 2012


On Sat, 7 Jul 2012, Jay Ashworth wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Alexander Fisher" <alex at alexfisher.me.uk>
>
>> I've also had some odd behavior from one of my non-enterprise Seagate
>> drives. It's firmware locked up the other day, the drive not coming
>> back without a power cycle.
>
> I believe you had the same problem that I've had on 5 different Seagates
> over the last 4 years:
>
> There's a black hole somewhere on the drive.  If you never touch it, the drive
> works just fine.  But the second you even read one of those sectors, the
> drive adapter falls off line, and Linux can't touch it anymore, and it doesn't
> recover until you power the drive off.  Once you do, everything's fine until
> you hit that spot again.
>
> Sound familiar?

Probably the drive has developed some unreadable sector(s). Have a look at
the output of 'smartctl -a /dev/sdX' (specifically "Current Pending Sector"
and "Offline Uncorrectable" attributes) and the kernel error log, which
might give you some clue as to where the problem is.

Once you know where the problematic sectors are, find what's occupying them,
delete it (it's unreadable now, anyway; you've got a backup, right?!), then
*write* to those sectors. If the write fails, the drive is toast. If it
succeeds, the drive will probably be good as new (and the "Reallocated
Sector C[oun]t" attribute will be higher, if they were hard - rather than
soft - errors).

> Cheers,
> -- jra

Best Regards,
Alex


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