bad laptop, no i/o error

[forgotten_aria]

My laptops hard drive is throwing errors, requiring a reboot twice to three times a day. Your laptop says, "No, you may not spend money on new things, you must spend money on ME!!"

Comments

[testing4l.livejournal.com]

Don't you mean exceptions? You object oriented freak 8)

Incidentally, it may be contagious. I'm beginning to suspect HDD errors on podkayne. =(

[nacht_musik]

Have you tried checking the SMART data for the drive? If the remapped sector count is more than a few dozen,
you can probably have it RMA'd with the manufacturer. In general, hard disks are warrantied for at least 3 years.

[zkzkz.livejournal.com]

What tools do you use to check this? I've been bitten by a few bad drives recently and am interested in being able to detect things before they get so bad they produce unrecoverable errors.

[nacht_musik]

smartmontools is the best thing I've found for use inside Unix
(and apparently now OSX): http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

If you can't use that for some reason, you may be able to make
use of the older "smartsuite" package.

Both packages provide a "smartctl" binary, which you typically need to run as root against the disk device (e.g. "smartctl -a /dev/hda")

[bob-wonderllama.livejournal.com]

doh! I hope it comes back from service quickly.