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What's the best way to check for HDD errors and early signs of failure on CentOS?

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  • 1
    how frequent should the checks be? daily - weekly?
    – inac
    Jun 12, 2010 at 4:19

6 Answers 6

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I would recommend installing smartmon (http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki) to your machine this is some software which can check the health of your disks otherwise its going to be checking /var/log/messages or /var/log/syslog for any mentions of scsi errors

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  • smartmon seems it, although its stats mention it'd catch only 60% of failing drives.. if i set smartmon to scan daily, would this actually help the hdd die faster -- it's a seagate 7200.10?
    – inac
    Jun 12, 2010 at 4:18
  • @inac smartmon will help hdds to die faster? Where did you read this? Please add an URL.
    – 030
    Feb 26, 2015 at 12:19
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dmesg

The kernel will log any diagnostic messages about I/O devices, so you can check those messages out with the dmesg command.

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  • but you'd have to run this manually or cronjob dmesg dump to vi?
    – inac
    Jun 12, 2010 at 4:17
  • either. you could create a script to dump it with "dmesg > dmesg.dump.txt" and run that daily with cron.
    – Banjer
    Jun 14, 2010 at 19:25
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SMART monitoring is a good way. As root, smartctl -a /dev/hda, where hda is the drive you want... could be hdb, sda, etc. Also recommend setting your email address in /etc/aliases as the person who should get root's mail.

That's a very vague answer though. If you have a server made by any of the big manufacturers (Dell, HP, etc), chances are there are better monitoring capabilities available.

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You can run fsck on the device to check for errors.

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As Paul says, the SMART logs are a good place to check.

I'd also recommend running BadBlocks. If you've got a RAID card, you might have to use the monitoring on that.

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You can try full check of partition /dev/sda1 (for example) as

fsck -f /dev/sda1

or, try full write-read non-descructive test of given partition

badblocks -vn /dev/sda1
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  • /dev/sda1 is mounted; it's not safe to run badblocks!
    – 030
    Feb 26, 2015 at 11:58
  • e2fsck: Cannot continue, aborting.
    – 030
    Feb 26, 2015 at 11:58
  • @030 Drop to a runlevel where the main disk is not mounted.
    – awiebe
    Aug 10, 2018 at 10:00

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