[C M Reinehr]

Stuart,

On Tue 07 August 2012 03:48:36 pm Stuart Biggerstaff wrote:
> The system is a Dell Poweredge R410, with two SATA disks in RAID 1.  It has
> been running for about three years.  Just over a month ago, disk 0
> gradually failed.  And running diagnostics on it has confirmed it to be
> bad--at least initially, now it's dead and a PC won't even boot with it
> connected.

When you say "won't boot", exactly what do you mean? Are you using GRUB or 
LILO? GRUB will not automatically write boot information to the boot tracks of 
both disks in a RAID 1 configuration. You have to do it manually. If the 
defective drive happened to be your boot drive you wouldn't be able to boot 
without a boot disk/thumbdrive, etc.

> A replacement turned up as predicted to fail (by the system LED) once the
> RAID array was synchronized.  Pulling it and connecting it to a spare PC
> to run Seagate's diagnostics showed "SMART has been tripped" and the
> seller was willing to replace it as defective.
> 
> But the second replacement is showing evidence it is failing.  So now
> trying to figure how the SATA interface can work to the extent it properly
> reads and writes the drive, but causes it to go bad.  Or else I've gotten
> two defective hard drives.  Has anyone seen a situation where a disk has
> been broken by a system that is able to successfully access it?

I wouldn't rule out two defective drives. I went through something similar, 
although not quite so egregious, a few years ago. I have a personal 
workstation with two Western Digital 10K RPM SATA drives. The first year, both 
drives failed and were replaced under warranty -- luckily not at the exact 
same time. The next year, both drives failed again and were again replaced 
under warranty. (I would replace one and within a few weeks the second would 
fail.) When this happened yet again the third year, I finally took a really 
close look at the labels and realized that they'd been sending me 
remanufactured drives. I, immediately, ordered two brand new drives and have 
managed about three years out of them. (Had to replace one last week, but so 
far the other seems to be doing well -- knock on wood!)

But, as Lonni said in his post, you also could have something seriously wrong 
with your SATA circuitry.

I always keep a spare drive in the closet and have become really good at 
swapping drives and rebuilding RAID arrays & logical volumes! ;-)

> Stuart Biggerstaff

Cheers!

cmr

-- 
Debian 'Lenny' - Registered Linux User #241964
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