[Discuss] Fedora 8 and new system works straight out of the box.

[R. Langkamer]

On 3/5/08 9:07 PM, Deryk Barker wrote:

> John Blomfield wrote:
>> One quick update!  After updating all the latest patches and kernel I 
>> reboot and had a file system failure!  Fedora recovered well putting 
>> me at a file system recovery prompt and telling me to run fsck 
>> manually.  I ran through numerous fixes ending in an automatic reboot 
>> and Fedora recovered the file system without any noticeable problems 
>> with the installation.  My conclusion is that there must have been 
>> some bad sectors on the new HD which were then bypassed.  Its years 
>> since I have seen bad sectors on a drive!
>>
> I'd keep a very close eye on this: since the coming of IDE (Intelligent 
> Drive Electronics!) bad sectors have been handled by the disk controller 
> during a low-level format. If the disk is flakey, you may  have problems 
> down the line.
> 
> I had a not dissimilar experience with my new office machine, getting 
> the BIOS to rediscover the HDD fixed it - for now...


	I would add, that the built-in smart status reporting inside bios' and 
OS' is in adequate. Compile/install the recent smart tools and use that 
to get a real report.
	I have a client on a (now) older G5 PowerMac. The internal hard drive 
that came with the computer is a SATA 160GB and I discovered, through 
the use of smart tools, that the drive was failing. The information 
reported by Disk Utility (Apple's disk management software), only said 
"verified" which is the same as an "overall" smart status report will 
say even though the actual short and long tests failed to complete. In 
short, the drive was failing and only smart tools was able to provide 
clear and accurate information detailing as such.

	For the benefit of others, don't trust what the bios or the OS say, 
trust the correct tool. :)

-- 

Sincerely,

R. Langkamer

cross platform specialist
Mac - Linux - windows

Langkamer I.T.
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