Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Device: /dev/sda, 1 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors

SkyHi @ Tuesday, May 29, 2012

I sometimes get these annoying messages from smartd. They only occur with Samsung HD103SIS SATA disks. According to my google research, these messages are not harmful and a Samsung speciality. One reason for me to avoid Samsung in future. The messages should disappear after a reboot. However, since the disks are built into a RAID1 on a 24x7 server I want to avoid rebooting the server. Instead I can get rid of these messages without a reboot when overwriting the whole disk with zeros. Please click here for details.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

 [Verbergen]

Removing the disk from the array

The first step is remove the corresponding disk from the array. This is first done by failing the disk and afterwards removing it. In my case, the disk is part of three RAID1 volumes md0, md1 and md2:
mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --fail /dev/sda1
mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --remove /dev/sda1

mdadm --manage /dev/md2 --fail /dev/sda3
mdadm --manage /dev/md2 --remove /dev/sda3

mdadm --manage /dev/md1 --fail /dev/sda4
mdadm --manage /dev/md1 --remove /dev/sda4

Zeroing the disk

Since the disk is removed from the RAID it is safe now to overwrite is with zeroes. As soon as the disk is completely zeroed out, the messages disappear. In my case, the disk is 1TB:
cat /dev/zero | pv -s 1000G | dd of=/dev/sda bs=100M

Recreate partition layout

Now you have to recreate the partition layout with fdisk or cfdisk. In my case, the two RAID1 disks are identical, so I can copy the partition layout from the other disk:
sfdisk -d /dev/sdb | sfdisk /dev/sda 
sfdisk -R /dev/sda

Adding the disk to the RAID

This is simple as before:
mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --add /dev/sda1
mdadm --manage /dev/md2 --add /dev/sda3
mdadm --manage /dev/md1 --add /dev/sda4

reinstall grub

In my case I installed grub on both disks. In case of failure of a single disk, the system is always fully bootable and running.
grub-install /dev/sda
Or if you use symbolic names (like me), just reinstall on both devices:
grub-install /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_SAMSUNG_HD103SIS1VSJ1KS300499
grub-install /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_SAMSUNG_HD103SIS1VSJ1KS300505



REFERENCES
http://niki.hammler.net/wiki/Device:_/dev/sda,_1_Currently_unreadable_(pending)_sectors