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Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 10:40:10 +0200
From: Rogier Wolff <R.E.Wolff@BitWizard.nl>
To: Xavier Bestel <xavier.bestel@free.fr>
Cc: venom@sns.it, louie miranda <louie@chikka.com>,
       Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Hi is this critical??
Message-ID: <20020917104010.A6175@bitwizard.nl>
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On Mon, Sep 16, 2002 at 03:47:20PM +0200, Xavier Bestel wrote:
> Le lun 16/09/2002 ? 15:37, venom@sns.it a ?crit :
> > 
> > yes, this is critical.
> > It means that your HD is going to break soon.
> > 
> 
> Maybe these error messages should be a bit less cryptic for the
> uninitiated. Or is there a userspace utility to convert theses to
> luser-understandable messages ?

The problem is that you're going to leave out details to do this. 
This means that even the experts don't know what happened. 

>From the reported message I was able to pinpoint the exact spot on
his hdb2 partition where his drive has a bad spot, and I can calculate
the size of his hdb1 partition (In this case probably unneccesary
information, but still...). 

If the error message says something like: 

	"your harddrive hdb seems to be failing. Replace it NOW!"

then I can't make a valid decision about this. I have had a WD 31600
drive which had the trouble that the last 400M would go "bad": Lots of
bad blocks. In that situation I had to monitor the drive to just have
bad blocks in the last 400M or so, while I used only the first 1000M.
(Yes, only for "tmp" stuff.)

I also have a drive that has exactly ONE bad block. Run it through
"badblocks", and you can use the disk just fine. A read-ahead
might hit on the bad block, leading to funny error messages. However
I DO need to know which block.

MAC and Windows both try to give "simple" error messages. As a 
knowledgeable person I then am confronted with:

	"Something went wrong. Contact your sysadmin if you can't
	fix it yourself". 

Well, I -=AM=- the sysadmin, and would like to know what went wrong. 
Otherwise I can't fix it. This is NOT the way to go. 

			Roger. 

-- 
** R.E.Wolff@BitWizard.nl ** http://www.BitWizard.nl/ ** +31-15-2137555 **
*-- BitWizard writes Linux device drivers for any device you may have! --*
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