At least one of my two harddisks clicks!

[abalone]

It click... click... click... click... clicks and whatever command (say, apt-get update) is running has to wait for it to stop before it can continue. Here's the dmesg output that goes with it:

[32368.000259] ata3.01: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
[32368.000265] ata3.01: failed command: SMART
[32368.000272] ata3.01: cmd b0/d0:01:00:4f:c2/00:00:00:00:00/10 tag 0 pio 512 in
[32368.000273] res 40/00:00:00:4f:c2/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
[32368.000276] ata3.01: status: { DRDY }
[32368.336017] ata3: soft resetting link
[32368.524750] ata3.00: configured for UDMA/133
[32368.540362] ata3.01: configured for UDMA/100
[32368.540380] ata3: EH complete
[32376.000306] ata3.01: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
[32376.000312] ata3.01: failed command: SMART
[32376.000318] ata3.01: cmd b0/da:00:00:4f:c2/00:00:00:00:00/10 tag 0
[32376.000319] res 40/00:00:00:4f:c2/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
[32376.000322] ata3.01: status: { DRDY }
[32376.672019] ata3: soft resetting link
[32376.860979] ata3.00: configured for UDMA/133
[32376.876362] ata3.01: configured for UDMA/100
[32376.876379] ata3: EH complete

My question is this: Is there a softwarey way to, I don't know, quarantine the bad parts of the harddisk? Or is the drive just broken beyond redemption?

(Yes, I keep backups...)

[Snowhog]

Re: At least one of my two harddisks clicks!

When a disk begins to make noticable noises, it's time to get a replacement. It just isn't worth risking it's continued use.

[dibl]

Re: At least one of my two harddisks clicks!

Is there a softwarey way to, I don't know, quarantine the bad parts of the harddisk?

Come on -- get real! Hard drives are $60 USD!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136109

You are thinking of risking your data on a dying drive, to achieve what?

[abalone]

Re: At least one of my two harddisks clicks!

Money is tight!

[GreyGeek]

Re: At least one of my two harddisks clicks!

Each click you hear is your HD R/W head losing track of where it is at and recalibrating from the track 0 sector 0.

Normally, when a sector begins to go bad, the HD ROM software takes notice, activates a sector from the reserve (usually 5-10% of the HD capacity), copies the contents from the sector going bad into the new sector, updates the inode index to point to the new sector and marks the old sector bad. When you've run out of reserve space bad sectors can make the R/W head lose track, resulting in the HD calling the recalibration function.

Bottom line: Time to copy the contents of your HD to some backup device and replace the HD.

[dibl]

Re: At least one of my two harddisks clicks!

Money is tight!

I understand.

If there is data that you care about on that drive, please shut down your system, unplug and remove that drive, and set it somewhere safe. When you restart your system, edit /etc/fstab to remove its partitions from the list.

When it is possible to acquire a replacement drive, there is a chance that you can copy your data from the dying drive to the new drive, by connecting it one last time, just for that purpose. That's the best advice I can offer. Good luck!

[GreyGeek]

Re: At least one of my two harddisks clicks!

What make and model of HD is it?

[Troberg]

Re: At least one of my two harddisks clicks!

Even if money is tight, I strongly urge you to replace the disk. When a disk starts to make noises like that, it's usually dead within days or at most a few weeks. Workarounds will not help, except possibly as a temporary method to copy data off a bad drive, it's the physical hardware of the drive failing.

[abalone]

Re: At least one of my two harddisks clicks!

Well... drive 2 (primary slave) had made those clicky noises before and I did end up unplugging it... tried it again on a lark, reformatted everything and it worked for a while. Drive 1 (primary master) also failed me recently; again, I reformatted (the root partition, at any rate) and all was good or so it seemed.

Now I'm not entirely sure just which drive it is although above-quoted dmesg suggests it's #2. I don't absolutely need it, fortunately. It's a Samsung HD400LD drive sold as/by "Datalux". It's just UDMA5 max for some reason. Perhaps it's the chaff that didn't meet the quality requirements of the Samsung brand..

[TheBigAmbulance]

Re: At least one of my two harddisks clicks!

I agree with the guys on this one. If you are hearing noises, the days of the disk are numbered. I completely understand times are tight. But it's not something you are going to easily avoid. If there is some software that will fix it, I would put money down that it won't keep running for long.

IMHO - Replace the drive....

[abalone]

Re: At least one of my two harddisks clicks!

Sure. When I can. I was just wondering if there was a normal, not-so-workaround-like way to deal with this, like some fsck switch I haven't found... something in that direction. Basically what GreyGeek describes the drive itself is doing, marking bad sectors.

[dibl]

Re: At least one of my two harddisks clicks!

I vaguely remember (1986) when a new hard drive had to have the bad sectors marked by some DOS utility -- was it FDISK? Ahhh, those were days! 80286/12MHz CPU, with an 80287 math coprocessor, and a whopping 1.0MB of RAM, to go with a new 40MB hard drive that cost $300!

But, the problem here is not marking sectors. Even if you could mark them all today, and reformat it, in the coming days there will more bad sectors, and so on as it gradually degrades. It has gone unreliable, and the longer it runs, the more it degrades. That's why I suggested unplugging it and setting it aside, so you stop the degradation until the day you want to run it one more time, just to salvage whatever data is on it.

[abalone]

Re: At least one of my two harddisks clicks!

I've already backed it up.

[GreyGeek]

Re: At least one of my two harddisks clicks!

.....
Now I'm not entirely sure just which drive it is although above-quoted dmesg suggests it's #2. I don't absolutely need it, fortunately. It's a Samsung HD400LD drive sold as/by "Datalux". It's just UDMA5 max for some reason. Perhaps it's the chaff that didn't meet the quality requirements of the Samsung brand..

Rest assured, it IS the HD. Read this, part of which I quote here:

There is one more problem that is typical for all hard drives and Samsung drives particularly: bad sectors. After some period of time magnetic media starts to degrade and bad sectors appear.

Whenever the drive hits such unreadable area it could start freezing, ticking, scratching and sometimes even clicking. This leads to further damage to the media and causes more data loss. As soon as you start experiencing such symptoms while reading important files stop your computer immediately and consider talking to a professional. Any further attempts would just add up to the problems. In our lab we use special imaging hardware tools that are capable of reading raw sector data ignoring sector checksum check. That's usually the only way to retrieve as much data as possible from these sectors.

You have such a tool that can read "raw data" from your HD. It is console utility called "dd". Read its man pages. However, I would not rely on it extracting your data. I had to use it to extract indexes and images from a 15 year old Kodak Imagining system at work. It was tedious and I only recovered about 95% of the data. You would be better off to replace your HD now, while the data on it can be recovered. You can get an a $79 320GB "My Passport" external USB HD from Amazon or Walmart. You can get a 160GB HD from Amazon for $45.

[abalone]

Re: At least one of my two harddisks clicks!

.....
Now I'm not entirely sure just which drive it is although above-quoted dmesg suggests it's #2. I don't absolutely need it, fortunately. It's a Samsung HD400LD drive sold as/by "Datalux". It's just UDMA5 max for some reason. Perhaps it's the chaff that didn't meet the quality requirements of the Samsung brand..

Rest assured, it IS the HD. Read this, part of which I quote here:

There is one more problem that is typical for all hard drives and Samsung drives particularly: bad sectors. After some period of time magnetic media starts to degrade and bad sectors appear.

Whenever the drive hits such unreadable area it could start freezing, ticking, scratching and sometimes even clicking. This leads to further damage to the media and causes more data loss. As soon as you start experiencing such symptoms while reading important files stop your computer immediately and consider talking to a professional. Any further attempts would just add up to the problems. In our lab we use special imaging hardware tools that are capable of reading raw sector data ignoring sector checksum check. That's usually the only way to retrieve as much data as possible from these sectors.

You have such a tool that can read "raw data" from your HD. It is console utility called "dd". Read its man pages. However, I would not rely on it extracting your data. I had to use it to extract indexes and images from a 15 year old Kodak Imagining system at work. It was tedious and I only recovered about 95% of the data. You would be better off to replace your HD now, while the data on it can be recovered. You can get an a $79 320GB "My Passport" external USB HD from Amazon or Walmart. You can get a 160GB HD from Amazon for $45.

It's both harddisks, also only the Samsung clicks loud enough to notice. Lots of disk-related failures today. Yay.