Long time no post! Last Sunday I spotted the following email in my junk mailfolder:
Date: Sun, 21 May 2006 19:08:39 +0200
From: root <root@metis.lenznet>
To: <lenz@localhost.metis.lenznet>
Subject: SMART error (OfflineUncorrectableSector) detected on host: metis
This email was generated by the smartd daemon running on:
host name: metis
DNS domain: lenznet
NIS domain:
The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon:
Device: /dev/hda, 1 Offline uncorrectable sectors
For details see host's SYSLOG (default: /var/log/messages).
You can also use the smartctl utility for further investigation.
No additional email messages about this problem will be sent.
Which did not sound too good. In addition to that, the system had failed to resume from a suspend to disk earlier that day - the kernel experienced disk read errors while trying to load the suspended image from the swap partition. Fortunately a fresh reboot still worked and I ran a more thorough analysis of the disk drive by using
smartctl -t long /dev/hda. Using various Open Source tools from a
SUSE Linux 10.1 rescue system (which boots off the first installation CD) helped me to backup and restore my data without losing anything (except for some time, of course).
