[H-GEN] Is my portable drive dead?

[Benjamin Fowler]

Hello,

I have a portable hard drive, which I suspect is about to die on me.

So I backed up all the data, and tried poking at the hard drive using
smartmontools.

smartctl -t short /dev/sde


and then:

smartctl -Hc /dev/sde


I get:

# smartctl -Hc /dev/sde
> smartctl 5.40 2010-07-12 r3124 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] (local build)
> Copyright (C) 2002-10 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net
> === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
> SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
> Warning: This result is based on an Attribute check.
> General SMART Values:
> Offline data collection status:  (0x85) Offline data collection activity
>                                         was aborted by an interrupting
> command from host.
>                                         Auto Offline Data Collection:
> Enabled.
> Self-test execution status:      ( 118) The previous self-test completed
> having
>                                         the read element of the test
> failed.


So the overall drive SMART status is PASSED, but the scans keep puking on
read errors.

Digging further, to show results of recent scans:

# smartctl -l selftest  /dev/sde
> smartctl 5.40 2010-07-12 r3124 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] (local build)
> Copyright (C) 2002-10 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net
> === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
> SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
> Num  Test_Description    Status                  Remaining
>  LifeTime(hours)  LBA_of_first_error
> # 1  Short offline       Completed: read failure       60%      7949
>   264
> # 2  Short offline       Completed: read failure       50%      7949
>   264
> # 3  Short offline       Completed: read failure       60%      7947
>   256
> # 4  Short offline       Completed: read failure       60%      7947
>   256
> # 5  Extended offline    Completed: read failure       90%      7946
>   256
> # 6  Short offline       Completed: read failure       60%      7946
>   256
> #



Given how modern drives reallocate bad blocks, I hoped to try and force the
drive to reallocate the bad sectors, like so:

 dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sde conv=sync,noerror


But alas, it pukes with:

dd: writing to `/dev/sde': Input/output error
> 265+0 records in
> 264+0 records out
> 135168 bytes (135 kB) copied, 2.57017 s, 52.6 kB/s


So, is there anything else I can try, in order to salvage this drive, or
shall I just give it a decent burial?

Cheers, Ben.
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