I have a 2T hdd reported to be overheating and sometimes fully accessible, sometimes not.
Boot linux, start gparted: hdd partitions are shown correctly in gparted. Tell it to unmount one of the partitions and it then tries to reread the disc and always fails. Boot gparted22 live cd, it doesnt read the hdd at all.
I'd like to wipe the disc, put a single new partition on and format. But something somehow is prevnting this happening. Any ideas?
Even if its only accessible some of the time I have a use for it, as another backup layer.
En el artículo , snipped-for-privacy@care2.com escribió:
You would be crazy to use an intermittently-working disc for backup.
Take it out of the external housing - it's probably overheating as external enclosures don't provide enough cooling - and mount it internally in a PC.
Test it with Linux and 'badblocks -swv /dev/sdX' where X is the drive letter. Warning, this will overwrite all data on the disk. If it finds any bad blocks, even just one, bin it.
Seconded! I wouldn't waste the time and effort, not even on a drive that merely runs into write errors due to excessive MZER events after clocking over a million head unload cycles.
It wasn't a Western Digital HDD as one might have supposed - it was a
2TB Samsung SpinPoint that had suffered the misfortune to be subjected to its maximum power saving Power Management option in a FreeNAS (aka NAS4Free) setup for more than a year before the staggeringly high head unload count was noticed (its twin which also been subjected to the same settings had clocked a mere 168,000 cycles in the same period - Go figure! as the yanks are wont to say).
I see you're thinking it's one of those infamous Seagate external drives. You may be right but I thought he was referring to an internally fitted drive (possibly a Maxtor or Maxtor like Seagate) shoehorned into the space above another such drive in the two drive drive bay of one of the older lesser ventillated mid-tower cases.
Alternatively reboot from a UBCD (CD or pen drive) and run Seatools HDD diagnostic (or the appropriate manufacturer's diagnostic utility if it's not a Seagate or Maxtor drive) or failing any of those diagnostic options, Vivard. You may have to set the drive interface to IDE compatability mode in the BIOS/UEFI setup menu to make it visible to the diagnostic software.
If you find more than a dozen or so bad blocks, I'd be inclined to retire it if they're scattered across the LBA range. If any such blocks are in a fairly tightly defined area, you can get Vivard to concentrate its testing over the small region that encompasses the bad one to verify whether they were simply the result of a "One Off Event" or the sign of an ongoing or worseneing problem.
Don't use the 'remap bad blocks' option without at least verifying that it's most likely been the result of a one off event (the HDD makers provide so pitifully few 'spare' sectors for such remapping - a mere thousand or so out of the hundreds of millions of sectors that make up the usable capacity on a modern disk).
Remapping sectors takes considerably longer than retesting and there's no point in using the remapping option if retesting indicates a worsening problem that's likely to 'burn up' all the spare sectors in short order anyway. You'll have just wasted several hours of 'remapping' time for no useful gain in that event.
A few bad sectors (or even a few hundred bad sectors) is not always an indicator of impending disk failure so if money's tight and you can spare some time retesting and exercising the drive to prove that it's not a worsening condition, then it can sometimes be worth taking a chance, after all, even using a brand new drive involves some element of 'taking a chance' with your precious data anyway.
However, contemplating the use of a drive that totally fails to respond due to a suspected overheating problem is a totally different 'kettle of fish'. Overheating usually results in permanent damage rather than just problems that disappear when the overheating issue is resolved.
You need to be able to examine the SMART logs before coming to any such conclusion. The problem you're seeing may have nothing to do with overheating other than it being a factor in how a more serious fault in the controller begins to manifest itself.
An extra layer of backup with less than 100% certainty is an extra bit of i nsurance, not a downside.
its always been in a pc. I don't have enough detail to know the full story on why it overheated. With a bit more think time I suspect maybe it didnt, it does seem unlikely when bolted into a case with lots of airflow.
Seatools didnt see any HDD, waggled the power connector then it did, so wherever the fault lies it looks likely fixable. Seatools has found no fault with the drive, SMART stats all passed.
It turns out the overheating was caused by a psu fan problem, along with a high dissipation CPU.
So...all looks positive. Just need to track down the bad connection and hopefully will have a good drive fit for use in a PC
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