harddrive keeps restarting

[Lisa Kachold]

On 5/1/12, Mike Bushroe <mbushroe at gmail.com> wrote:
> Matt,
>   thanks for suggesting smartctl. Ubuntu had loaded a GUI version. It looks
> fine on all drives but the smallest (and therefore probably oldest) one. I
> had to apt-get install smartmontools to get the command line version. The
> GUI was returning almost immediately from the self test with no values for
> any test parameters. The command line gave the data below. The error count
> kept increasing when I re-ran it. It looks like the drive is trying to
> start up and finding a smart mode error. If I just mount the volume (VFAT),
> it does not make the sound and the directory appears to work correctly
> (virtually nothing left on that drive, anyway). But when I unmount it, and
> try to run tests, it starts making the sounds again every minute or so, and
> the error count begins to go up again. I guess it is time to shred the
> drive. remove it and throw it away.
>
> Mike
>
> === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
> SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: UNKNOWN!
> SMART Status, Attributes and Thresholds cannot be read.
>
> SMART Error Log Version: 1
> Warning: ATA error count 9953 inconsistent with error log pointer 5
>
> ATA Error Count: 9953 (device log contains only the most recent five
> errors)
>         CR = Command Register [HEX]
>         FR = Features Register [HEX]
>         SC = Sector Count Register [HEX]
>         SN = Sector Number Register [HEX]
>         CL = Cylinder Low Register [HEX]
>         CH = Cylinder High Register [HEX]
>         DH = Device/Head Register [HEX]
>         DC = Device Command Register [HEX]
>         ER = Error register [HEX]
>         ST = Status register [HEX]
> Powered_Up_Time is measured from power on, and printed as
> DDd+hh:mm:SS.sss where DD=days, hh=hours, mm=minutes,
> SS=sec, and sss=millisec. It "wraps" after 49.710 days.
>
> Error 9953 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 8634 hours (359 days + 18
> hours)
>   When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was in an
> unknown state.
>
>   After command completion occurred, registers were:
>   ER ST SC SN CL CH DH
>   -- -- -- -- -- -- --
>   04 51 00 07 4f c2 10  Error: ABRT
>
>   Commands leading to the command that caused the error were:
>   CR FR SC SN CL CH DH DC   Powered_Up_Time  Command/Feature_Name
>   -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --  ----------------  --------------------
>   b0 da 00 00 4f c2 10 08  17d+09:09:16.032  SMART RETURN STATUS
>   b0 d0 01 00 4f c2 10 08  17d+09:09:12.992  SMART READ DATA
>   ec 00 01 00 00 00 10 08  17d+09:09:12.976  IDENTIFY DEVICE
>   ec 00 01 00 00 00 10 08  17d+09:09:12.976  IDENTIFY DEVICE
>   ca 00 01 a4 88 03 f0 08  17d+09:02:49.152  WRITE DMA
>
>
> --
> But he lives on in a Horcrux named Siri
>
"Pre-fail" is the name (or description) of that particular SMART
counter, as is "Old Age". If there were positive and increasing values
in those rows, it could indicate a pre-failure condition. A brand new
drive still has prefail and old-age counters, even though it may not
fail or be old for years to come.

This just looks like you have an older drive where the counters are no
longer within acceptable range.

Do you have power management on this drive?

This could also cause that ABRT error.

The gist is that the read/write head on these drives parks itself too
often. While this does result in power savings while parked, the
drives are only designed to support 300k parks (consumer drives) or
600k parks (enterprise/RE2 edition).

Either way, the smart data will show how many times the head has been
parked via the "Load_Cycle_Count" parameter.

An (edited) example:

smartctl -a /dev/sda
Power_On_Hours   3377
Load_Cycle_Count 97972

The "solution" so far has been to use the "wdidle3.exe" DOS utility
provided by Western Digital to change the head-park idle timer to a
different value (or disable it all together).
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