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About this blog: Computers hate me. They really do. Every time I try to do something unusual like add new hardware, something is guaranteed to go wrong. I decided to start writing about my constant problems so that someone else might benefit from my experiences - or at least laugh at them!

  Second WD failure

17 June 2008, 01:40am      


I was watching TV in the family room when I heard the dreaded chirp signalling that a RAID array was degraded.

Further investigation revealed: "Error: AMNF 32 sectors at LBA = 0x001a3060 = 1716320" (AMNF appears to be Address Mark Not Found)

Both short and long drive tests failed:

SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1

A subsequent zero fill seems to have quietly hidden the bad area - as you can see above further self tests succeed - but SMART was now showing 5 uncorrectable errors:

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16

I opened a ticket with Western Digital asking whether this sudden increase (and also non zero count) of uncorrectable errors in a drive that had been powered on for only 2 1/2 months was sufficient to return the drive. In the meantime, I wrote random junk to the drive (FreeBSD: dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/ad10 bs=65536 in an endless loop) to "cover" the existing data and also see if I could evoke further errors. I received an affirmative response from WD a few days later, so I returned to my retailer armed with printouts of the ticket and data from smartctl. It was a little touch and go for a couple of minutes, but I had it replaced with a new one.




Related posts:
WD RE3 failure after 175 hours powered on
First WD failure
4th WD drive failure
ZOMG!!111!1one!1 Yet another HD failure...
Another HD failure
A complete list of all recent hard drive failures in the office