[kwlug-disc] Media errors on a USB disk

[Lori Paniak]

Have you changed the USB cable recently?  Do the drives work on a
different computer?

You might want to put the drives directly on a SATA connection and run a
check with smartmontools to see the health of the drives.  Such a check
probably won't work through the USB bridge.


On Wed, 2010-10-20 at 10:33 -0400, Eric Gerlach wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 10:08 AM, Khalid Baheyeldin <kb at 2bits.com> wrote:
> > For the weekly backup, I am now getting this error:
> >
> > [2388063.441067] sd 13:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK
> > driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE,SUGGEST_OK
> > [2388063.441073] sd 13:0:0:0: [sdb] Sense Key : Medium Error [current]
> > [2388063.441077] sd 13:0:0:0: [sdb] Add. Sense: Unrecovered read error
> > [2388063.441080] end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 177045897
> > [2388064.495756] sd 13:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK
> > driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE,SUGGEST_OK
> > [2388064.495762] sd 13:0:0:0: [sdb] Sense Key : Medium Error [current]
> > [2388064.495765] sd 13:0:0:0: [sdb] Add. Sense: Unrecovered read error
> > [2388064.495768] end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 177045897
> >
> > If I replace the disk with an identical brand (but has a different make
> > of disk inside), I get other errors.
> >
> > These two disks have been stable and trouble free for about 2 years,
> > with no issues.
> >
> > My questions are:
> >
> > 1. Short of dd if=/dev/sdb, is there a way to detect blocks?
> 
> SpinRite.  Proprietary, but the best I know of.
> 
> > 2. Do we have a way to add the bad blocks to a list that the operating
> > system
> > should ignore, like we had in the old days?
> 
> No, now drives do this internally.  Drives keep a percentage of their
> sectors as spares, and swap them in when needed.  SpinRite helps the
> drive find those bad blocks, recover the data, and then relocate the
> blocks.
> 
> > 3. Could this be a quirk of some sort? How do I know for sure if it is
> > really a media problem or some bug/quirk?
> 
> No idea.  I don't even know what those errors mean, so I can't even
> confirm for sure that it's bad blocks.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Eric
> 
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