[mdlug] OT: Hardrive - Good or Bad

[Jeff Hanson]

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 5:35 PM, Stan Green<Stan at mcomputersolutions.com> wrote:
> I had a EIDE 250G WD drive in a RAID 5 array. The system failed the drive, so
> I replaced it. (Yes, I am 100% sure I took out the right drive.) So a few
> months later, I decided to see I the drive just had bad blocks and could be
> fixed. So I put the drive in another PC and ran mke2fs -j -cc. This ran fine
> and reported no errors. Then I ran smartctl -d ata -t long. This also
> reported  (smartctl -H) no errors.
>
> So what am I to believe; RAID, mke2fs or smartcl to tell me if the drive is
> good or bad? Given 2 out of 3 say it is good, should I trust it?
>

I had a lot of problems with hard drive failures on a EIDE/PATA RAID
system (md-RAID) with an Intel chipset MB and WD drives.  Eventually I
though the MB was bad so I switched to a different Intel chipset MB.
I also switched from Ubuntu Hardy to Jaunty.  This too had failures so
I switched to an AMD/ATI MB and the problems went away.  It can be
really difficult to tell where a problem is in a hard drive system.
Maybe try it in a different system with a different IDE controller.