Timothy Pearson wrote:
>> On Saturday 08 October 2011 19:41:56 Mag. Dr. Nikolaus Klepp wrote:
>>> Well, looks like the harddrive. Get a drive now, your's could fail any
>>> second.
>> I have one on order!
>>
>> Lisi
>>
> 
> In my experience if the drive is going to die completely it will do so
> without much warning.  The bad sectors you are experiencing are more like
> a cancer (dying R/W heads, bad disk surface, one or more head crashes in
> the past, etc.) and will continue to spread.  The less you use the disk
> the better, as each write access will likely corrupt more sectors.


You said you ran smartctrl which found "some errors", but you didn't say 
how many or how serious. Most hard drives will be expected to develop 
bad blocks over time: they're normally found by the drive and mapped 
away to never be used again.

Have you done an fsck on the file system?

I always install two hard drives in desktops and use software RAID-1 for 
redundancy in case of a failed drive. RAID is not just for servers :)



-- 
Steven