Hello,
We had a wierd problem with redhat this weekend. The server stopped responding. On reboot fsck said there were bad blocks. I forced mounted the drives and everythign was ok I ran esfsck and marked the blocks. My problem is should I be worried about this???
I can sedn the drive back to Western Digital but is there a way copy an entire drive over to a new drive if so please let me know how as I am not sure.
This is a production server and can't afford downtime or loss of data.

If they actually have bad sectors, then its prob. a sign your dirve is about to fail....

Yep... in the "old days" a few bad blocks were normal for a drive, but they're very rare these days. (What few there might be are supposed to be compensated for by the drive out of the spare area.) It's definitely a sign the drive might be going bad.

BACK THAT DATA UP!

It's relatively easy to make a complete mirror of a drive in Linux. Install a new drive on the system, partition it the same, and cp -ax all the data.

Thanks man,

Darkedge is one of our unix guys.. The bad thing is this drive is new. This server had the same drive before put in it and 3 days later crashed sent it back got a new one. Now this one has been in there about 2 1/2 weeks and now getting bad blocks.. I think we got a bad stock of drives.. :(

Must got them all off the bottom.. LOL

Going to oorder some new ones now.. :D


You said (partition it the same) does it matter if the size for each partion is bigger if i get a bigger drive or smaller if i get a smaller drive. I would think not as long as they are partitioned the same but just want to check.. :)

Yep, the partitions can be bigger, just as long as there's enough room for the data. Linux isn't picky. :)

Darkedge,
A good idea if the server is important is bust out those SCSI hard drives, they may be a lot more expensive, but they are very reliable and when you delete a big file, it gets deleted in 2 seconds and not 40 seconds like IDE :)

Yeah I would except I don't buy the hardware around here. This is actually the first time i have had this many problems with any harddrives. I think WD has stopped worrying about quality and is worried about size more. IBM is going to be my only IDE of choice from now on and maybe Maxtor since they seem to have gotten their act together. I mean its scary WD doesnt even really ask questions about returned drives any more they are just like "oh yeah drive went bad no problem happens all the time just send it back and we will send you a new one" This makes me a little nervous. :(

The only drives weve ever had problems with our WD but we use hundreds of them and only a couple have gone bad which is pretty good.

THe facts are all the drives have about the same failure rate, a study was done a few months ago. Its just WD sells alot more drives than any of the other manufacturers people notice more....