[kwlug-disc] Media errors on a USB disk

Khalid Baheyeldin kb at 2bits.com
Wed Oct 20 14:30:37 EDT 2010


Aha! I knew there has to be something.

I am trying it now. It is very slow on a 1TB drive and USB.

Will report back what it did.

On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 1:12 PM, Andrew Sullivan Cant <
acant at alumni.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:

> As a FLOSS alternative and if you are using ext2/ext3/ext4 then e2fsck will
> also check for bad blocks and do corrections.
>
> e2fsck -c -y /dev/sdb
> -c will try to detect and fix bad block by adding then to the bad block
> inode
> and -y will answer yes to doing all of the corrections. Which is probably
> what you want most of the time.
>
>
> I have not tried SpinRite so I don't know what additional magic it might
> do.
>
>
> Andrew
>
>
> On 20/10/10 10:33 AM, 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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>
>
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-- 
Khalid M. Baheyeldin
2bits.com, Inc.
http://2bits.com
Drupal optimization, development, customization and consulting.
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. --  Edsger W.Dijkstra
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. --   Leonardo da Vinci
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