Hard disk failing warning on fedora 12

[Tom Varghese]

Last week, i updated, my fedora. After that, during every boot up, I am getting a warning message like " Your hard disk may failing". It indicates that it is due to bad sectors. But I don't think so. There was a bug reported for a similar problem in fedora 11. I think it is not fixed yet. Hard disk is not having any problem during data access. Other OS including windows are not giving any warning message. Comment on it please.

[oz]

Last week, i updated, my fedora. After that, during every boot up, I am getting a warning message like " Your hard disk may failing". It indicates that it is due to bad sectors. But I don't think so. There was a bug reported for a similar problem in fedora 11. I think it is not fixed yet. Hard disk is not having any problem during data access. Other OS including windows are not giving any warning message. Comment on it please.

Just to be on the safe side, I'd recommend checking your hard drive manufacturer's website to see what diagnostics tools they offer for checking the integrity of your hard drive, then run the utility on the drive to see if it reports any problems. It's also a good idea to keep full backups on hand whether there are current drive problems, or not. You could also check the file system using fsck. Run man fsck for details on using it.

I'm not familiar with the bug that you reference so can't comment on it.

[Rubberman]

A lot of discs these days are supporting the SMART protocols. The drive controller itself (on the drive) monitors the health of the drive and reports to the operating system when statistics indicate that the drive is starting to fail, hopefully in time to replace the drive before data has been lost. I had that situation on a Seagate drive earlier this year, and indeed the drive was failing. It was replaced by Seagate under warranty at no cost to me.

So, take this seriously. Run fsck with the -c option to force it to check for bad blocks. FWIW, windows is brain-dead with respect to S.M.A.R.T.

[Tom Varghese]

I got a warning message like this while tried to run fsck:

WARNING!!! Running e2fsck on a mounted filesystem may cause
SEVERE filesystem damage.

[devils casper]

Do not execute fsck on mounted partitions.
Boot up from LiveCD of any Linux distro and execute fsck on partition.

[Rubberman]

You need to unmount the file system first, or remount it into read-only mode. Example: mount -o remount,ro mountpoint
To do that, you have to shut down any applications that may have files open for write/update access. Preferably, boot into single-user mode first.

[Tom Varghese]

It is not unmountable because entire OS is working on it. How to make it read only. How to know the mount point?

[oz]

It is not unmountable because entire OS is working on it. How to make it read only. How to know the mount point?

It won't be mounted if you boot with a liveCD and run fsck from that as suggested earlier.

[Rubberman]

It is not unmountable because entire OS is working on it. How to make it read only. How to know the mount point?

As mentioned, you can either boot into single user mode and login as root - use mount without any arguments to find the mount points. Then you should be able to remount them read-only. Alternatively, you can boot with a liveCD or rescue CD and run fsck on the unmounted file systems.

[Tom Varghese]

I didn't tried it in single user mode yet. Before that, what is the exact command to make the mount point read only.If you give the exact statement,
I first o in single user mode and type 'mount' on terminal to get mounted points. Then I execute the command you provide soon to make it read only. Then I will run 'fsck'.