Smartd Error Message generated by Smartd Daemon Proces
 

Sir,
My Linux distro is RedHat Enterprise Linux 4(dual booting with WindowsXP).As soon as I boot into the shell prompt,I recieve a mail for the root user with the below messages.This happens after every reboot of the system.I don't know what to make out of this message.I've been using Linux on my system for the past one year and am recieving this message only for the last one month.Please help me out:confused: .My hard disk is 40GB Samsung 7200RPM.

Mail

To: root@rex1.midearth.com
Subject: SMART error (OfflineUncorrectableSector) detected on host: rex1.midearth.com
Status: RO

This email was generated by the smartd daemon running on:

host name: rex1.midearth.com
DNS domain: midearth.com
NIS domain: (none)

The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon:

Device: /dev/hda, 1 Offline uncorrectable sectors

For details see host's SYSLOG (default: /var/log/messages).

You can also use the smartctl utility for further investigation.
No additional email messages about this problem will be sent.

**********************************************************

Since it's a pretty lengthy file(/var/log/messages) I've posted here only the lines containing the word "smartd",

Nov 25 21:21:17 rex1 smartd[2171]: smartd version 5.33 [i386-redhat-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-4 Bruce Allen
Nov 25 21:21:17 rex1 smartd[2171]: Opened configuration file /etc/smartd.conf
Nov 25 21:21:17 rex1 smartd[2171]: Configuration file /etc/smartd.conf parsed.
Nov 25 21:21:17 rex1 smartd[2171]: Device: /dev/hda, opened
Nov 25 21:21:17 rex1 smartd[2171]: Device: /dev/hda, found in smartd database.
Nov 25 21:21:17 rex1 smartd[2171]: Device: /dev/hda, is SMART capable. Adding to "monitor" list.
Nov 25 21:21:17 rex1 smartd[2171]: Monitoring 1 ATA and 0 SCSI devices
Nov 25 21:21:17 rex1 smartd[2171]: Device: /dev/hda, 1 Offline uncorrectable sectors
Nov 25 21:21:17 rex1 smartd[2171]: Sending warning via mail to root@localhost.localdomain ...
Nov 25 21:21:18 rex1 smartd[2176]: smartd has fork()ed into background mode. New PID=2176.
Nov 25 21:21:18 rex1 smartd: smartd startup succeeded

Running /usr/sbin/smartctl -H /dev/hda will tell you if the drive passes the health check, and /usr/sbin/smartctl -a /dev/hda will give you more info than you ever wanted, but there is a section that goes through the tests and tells you when something failed. <edit> That section alone can apparently be shown by changing the -a to -A.</edit>

Check out man smartctl for more info.

Hope that helps,

Scott McNeely