Stale Drive Info?

[Spinman]

Running Scanner on my WHS2011 platform.  One day the scanner identified a drive as having a bad sector. Scanner would never seem to be able to pass the sector in trouble (constantly trying to read?). The drive would then begin to drop and reattach every 30 seconds or so. I pulled the drive in question and tested it in a win7 box that also has scanner installed and did not encountered any problems. The drive reported clean. Ran the MFG diagnostic programs and the drive reported clean. WHS still reported a drive had a critical error - even though the drive was no longer installed in the box. Reinstalled back into the WHS 2011 machine, and the drive dropping problem soon began again.

 

Upgraded Scanner to latest beta {v2.5.0.341 } to see if that would handle the drive any differently - it did not, drive was constantly dropping. Thought I would need to replace the drive. As a last resort, I installed a drive cage to facilitate hot swaps and utilized new cables to the controller for all drives.  While I tried to match the drives to the previously used controller ports - apparently I didn't. When I rebooted all drives were recognized and functioning, but scanner reported that they had never been scanned - I lost my history.  I still had an WHS critical error message that one drive had a bad sector. (How could it know if the drives had never been scanned). Strange that the scanner program did not match the prior drive history with the current drive installation, instead thinking them to be drives it had never seen before.

 

Scanner finally finished scanning all drives and reported that all were at 100% (3 green check marks on each drive). So perhaps my bad sector and drive dropping was the result of a bad cable or controller port.

But even after the scan has completed, WHS is still reporting a drive has a bad sector. I have rerun the analysis and it still shows a drive has a bad sector.

 

I note the add-in "Home Server Smart 2013" has an option to delete stale drive information for drives that are no longer mounted in the system.  Wondering if there should be such an opion on Drive Scanner.

Is there something in the registry I should manually delete to see if that will eliminate my bad sector error warning message? 

[dbailey75]

IIRC,  bad sectors info is stored in the HDD's smart stats, so any new data written to the drive would not be written to the the bad sector, this data is fed to the scanner as soon as the server boots.  Bad sectors are ok, but you need to keep an eye on the drive in case the count starts to increase.   

 

And it could be coincidence of sorts with the bad cable on the drive with the bad sector.   I ran in to an issue a while back with a new controller card that came with new cables, and had a lot of issues with drives dropping, etc, replaced the sata cables with some of the ones with the clips, all was good.  Maybe it was the cable, or the connector its self was not making a good connection with the cable,  IDK, 

 

I believe you can ignore the bad sector warnings, but again, make sure the counts are not increasing, which may be why your still getting the warnings.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

In this case, it sounds like maybe a bad connection or bad cable.

 

I've ran into that myself. Bunch of uncorrectable sector counts in SMART, and Scanner found a bunch of bad sectors. Moved it to a different port, and they all went away....

 

As for the notification, you should be able to just delete that in the dashboard.

If it's not going away, let us know.

[Spinman]

Ah Yes, I always forget to manually delete the notification in dashboard.  Instead, I expect the system to automatically remove it once the problem has been resolved.  I did delete it, and it has not come back. So all is well for the moment.

 

I checked the SMART for the drive in question, as well as all drives - and the statistics show no bad sectors and no reallocated sectors.  That would explain why the drive showed no errors when loaded in another system.

 

So I guess I'm confused as to why stablebit scanner set the drive as having a bad sector in dash board in the first place.   No harm, no foul.

 

Thanks

[Christopher (Drashna)]

yeah, unfortunately, sometimes the dashboard doesn't "get the hint" and fails to remove the notifications properly.

 

As for why it happened, could be a bad or loose connection, a bad cable, etc. I've actually seen that on my system, where a bad cable was causing SMART errors and causing Scanner to report bad sectors. As soon as I moved the disk, the errors went away.

So, even if the disk is healthy, well, any point of failure between the disk and the software can cause "false positives" basically.