Disk Utility (First it is many bad sectors, now a few.) In XP SMART fails, Short and long DST pass
 

Using Debian Squeeze 64bit.

One of my hard drives had shown man bad sectors. The rest where green and showed a few bad sectors.

Well the hard drive that had shown many bad sectors is now showing a few bad sectors and is green.

Is Disk Utility just not that good yet? Or did my hard drive some how fix itself?

I was going to stop using this hard drive but I think I am going to just ignore Disk Utility for now. I know in the past it has had false positives. But I really thought it was fixed by now.

Also, if a drive is encrypted, like with truecrypt, will that mess up Disk Utilities readings at all?

I just checked my disk status using Gnome disk utility. It looks like it has some component listening for SMART disk errors. This allows it to give you a report immediately.

Bad blocks on a disk are not unusual as long as there aren't too many of them. When the disk detects a bad block during a read it is supposed to automatically remap the data onto a new block. This may have happened a large number of times for your disk. It is possible that the disk is okay and that you simply observed a statistical anomaly.

This is a good time to mention the value of backups. If your partitions are backed up to a different device then you can afford to wait and see if the disk develops problems.

Well I installed Arch on the "bad drive" now it is telling me the drive is failing. But all appears to be ok. I have it encrypted so I am not sure if has anything to do with it or not.

Yes. I learned some years ago to back up and back up often. What I had to go through to learn that still gives me chills and nightmares, lol.

I will just wait and see. I do have XP installed so maybe I will double check with the manufacturers software to see what it says.

Thanks.

Your disk drive manufacturer may have downloadable test software. Seagate, Western Digital, and Hitachi are among manufacturers that offer free disk drive test software.

The Hitachi disk drive fitness test will work on other brands of disk drives. Here is a link to it.
http://www.hitachigst.com/support/downloads/

After going to Scroogle and quickly realizing that I didn't have a Stargate in my computer, I finally made it to the Seagate website.

Now the only thing that failed was the S.M.A.R.T test. Short Generic and Short DST both passed. I was going to do a long Generic and long DST but it takes to long. I can do that later if needed.

So what are peoples thoughts on this? Is anything to worry about right now?

The short SMART test are useless, IMO. Use the long test.

Bad blocks are an early sign of a failing drive, backup your data.

I don't get this. I did one of the long tests. I will do the generic long test later tonight. So basically it is only the SMART test that fails for some reason. Everything else is fine.

If it passes both tests, also post attribute table 'smartctl -A'.

I have seen failing drives pass SMART tests.

Again I would say make frequent backups and wait for the disk to fail. It could work adequately for years.

Even a long test, and good attributes ? It is rare, but possible.

Figures I would be on of those rare cases, lol.

Well I think I will just keep using it and just see. Maybe it's failing or maybe it is something else that is making it look like that (though I have no idea what that could be.) Chances are it is failing.

It seems to work fine with Arch. No data loss, no strange noises, no sparks or smoke. So I will just keep using it and always keeping data backed up.

Thanks all for the help with this really strange problem. If/when this drive goes I will post it here, even if it is in a few years. I am sure I will still be around as long as the Internet doesn't die.