On Mon, 2012-04-30 at 13:35 -0400, ergodic wrote:
Has anyone experienced Palimpsest discrepancies?
Palimsest in Fedora 16 reports a disk (MAXTOR STM3320620AS) as failing: "DISK HAS MANY BAD SECTORS" etc. SMART: 197 Current pending Sector Count Value -4 sectors.
Palimsest in Fedora 17 beta reports the same disk (MAXTOR STM3320620AS) as "OK" SMART: 197 Current pending Sector Count 0 sectors OK.
Obviously one is incorrect, which one?
Interpretation of the SMART data can be tricky. There's a longstanding bug where palimpsest considers numbers of 'bad' sectors that are well within manufacturers' tolerances to indicate a failing disk:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=498115
and it's possible you hit that in F16 and it's been corrected, at least for your particular disk, in F17. That '-4' does seem odd, though, as another poster mentioned. The bug report linked above has some useful diagnostic steps you can take.