More on HD

I tried a few more things to figure out what is going on with my hard drive. The first was to use the Gentoo LiveCD to run badblocks(8). That reported no issues, just like fsck.reiserfs did earlier.

The next thing was to go to Western Digital and download a copy of their Data Lifeguard Diagnostic Tools (CD).

Using that tool, I ran a ‘Quick Test’ and an ‘Extended Test’ (which is a full media scan) and both reported no errors. I did have one issue where the ‘Quick Test’ would randomly give me an 0132 command error which would seem to be a software issue with the tool more than the drive.

At this point I think maybe it’s just a kernel issue or maybe filesytem (but then why wouldn’t fsck or badblocks see it)? I’m tempted to just format and re-install. One thing is for sure until I see something worse I’m going to keep using the drive.

Bad Drive?

Was doing some work on Sussen when I discovered my filesystem had become mounted read-only. After taking a look at the logs, I’m starting to see lots of messages like this:

ata2: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
ata2: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }

I booted from a CD and did an fsck.reiserfs but it didn’t see any problems. I think this might be a bad disk and it’s going to die in the very near future.

The drive is a Western Digital 73 GB SATA HD (10,000 RPM). I’ve barely had it a week. Not good

Parsing Issue

Having a minor issue with parsing the OVAL XML. I’m justing having problems coming up with a way to turn some of the XML into more useful objects.

For example:

<oexec datatype=’int’ operator=’equals’>1</oexec>

Here I need to check the permission of a file, looking at the other execute bit. I need to create an int value of 1 and see if it equals the result of the permission check.

The challenge is trying to figure out how to handle different datatypes (int,string, bool) and operators (equals, pattern match, etc).

Working on it.