So we had a hard drive failure today and it got me thinking. It was a 200GB, sata, hard drive and since it was installed there has only been one 20 GB ext2 partition on that drive.
Could the rest of the drive be fine? No other partitions on that drive only unused free space.
This had filled up the syslog, stating different sectors every now and then:
sd 0:0:0:0: SCSI error: return code = 0x00040000
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 4093207
Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 491606
lost page write due to I/O error on sda1
Of course we replaced the drive, this is out of sheer curiosity.