BAD drives

[Dane Van Steenwyk]

I have a couple of bad A5633A HD's that failed the dd command and failed in STM. Since they were bad I did a mediainit on them for no reason and it seems to have fixed them?? After the mediainit they passed STM tests, the dd test and the ODE test. Are these drives going to be okay? Any info would be much appreciated. Thanks.

[KVK]

What about the #diskinfo /dev/rdsk/cXtXdX ==>output . Does it showing the 18GB ...
Check the #ioscan -fnC disk ==>output as well

[Dane Van Steenwyk]

diskinfo shows 18GB Seagate number is correct, ioscan shows 18GB CLAIMED. All looks good but it just scares me that they all tested BAD at first then after the mediainit all is good??

[Suraj Singh_1]

Hi,

mediainit is a low-level format of the hard disk. Seems to have repaired all the logical erros with the drive.

Should work fine...

~Suraj

[KVK]

Check the DD output as well command as follows

#dd if=/dev/rdsk/cXtXdX of=/dev/null bs=512k

If the command is ok ends with no error then your disk is alright

You can go ahead for other activity at your disk

[Vincent Fleming · Accepted solution]

The drive must have developed a bad spot, which the low-level format worked around. The format will simply skip bad areas on the disk.

However, bad areas like that normally "grow" with time, and it's very likely that the drive will fail again as this occurs.

I would replace the drive(s) as soon as possible, but you decide to give it a go, keep an eye on it for errors. Once it starts generating errors again, you should replace it.

As always, keep good backups!

Good luck,

Vince

[Dane Van Steenwyk]

The dd test worked fine so I am just going to continue using the drive but I will keep an eye on it. Thanks for the input guys!