"Off-Line Uncorrectable Sector Count 1-0" ??

The utility is called "Hard Disk Sentinel".

I don't know if the syntax is peculiar to that utility or is in general
use... but it sounds ominous to me.

There are two messages, repeated verbatim 4 times at different times of
day/dates:

#198 Off-Line Uncorrectable Sector Count 1-0
#197 Current Pending Sector Count 1-0

Screen snap: http://tinyurl.com/njz9tvr

If the numbers were "0-1" it would make sense to me - that some sort of
error had been found and the count incremented.

But 1-0 and the repetition?

Can anybody shed some light?
--
Pete Cresswell

(PeteCresswell) wrote:
The utility is called "Hard Disk Sentinel".

I don't know if the syntax is peculiar to that utility or is in general
use... but it sounds ominous to me.

There are two messages, repeated verbatim 4 times at different times of
day/dates:

#198 Off-Line Uncorrectable Sector Count 1-0
#197 Current Pending Sector Count 1-0

Screen snap: http://tinyurl.com/njz9tvr

If the numbers were "0-1" it would make sense to me - that some sort of
error had been found and the count incremented.

But 1-0 and the repetition?

Can anybody shed some light?

But you have a SMART tab on that thing. Check the SMART entries.

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-c...ctorCounts.jpg

*******

You can use HDTune and the Health tab there, to review SMART.

http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe

This is a summary of information, collected from three different
days, on a sick hard drive here... Currently this hard drive
still works, but it's in my "spares/junk" pile.

Current Worst Threshold Data Status
Reallocated Sector Count 100 100 36 0 OK
Reallocated Sector Count 100 100 36 57 OK
Reallocated Sector Count 98 98 36 104 OK

The Data field, is a measure of the Count. The Current field
resembles a "percent left" kind of display. These fields don't
always use 100, and there are other field types in SMART, that
might use 200 as their number.

The first entry in that table, is the "good" one.

The second and third, show the troubling trend. And on that
drive, it gets worse every time I do very large write operations
(100GB at a time). The Data count grows, and the percent left
drops.

Paul

In article , lid
says...

The utility is called "Hard Disk Sentinel".

I don't know if the syntax is peculiar to that utility or is in general
use... but it sounds ominous to me.

There are two messages, repeated verbatim 4 times at different times of
day/dates:

#198 Off-Line Uncorrectable Sector Count 1-0
#197 Current Pending Sector Count 1-0

Screen snap: http://tinyurl.com/njz9tvr

If the numbers were "0-1" it would make sense to me - that some sort of
error had been found and the count incremented.

But 1-0 and the repetition?

Can anybody shed some light?

When I see that as part of the drives SMART info I call and check
warranty after I start copying everything on it to another drive. This
usually also tells you if anything is amiss with the actual data, e.g.
can't copy a specific file or access some folder ect.

I use a tool called DiskInfo to view smart data, both WD and Seagate
seem to restrict to only their own what drives they see.

On 27/03/2014 5:35 PM, (PeteCresswell) wrote:
The utility is called "Hard Disk Sentinel".

I don't know if the syntax is peculiar to that utility or is in general
use... but it sounds ominous to me.

There are two messages, repeated verbatim 4 times at different times of
day/dates:

#198 Off-Line Uncorrectable Sector Count 1-0
#197 Current Pending Sector Count 1-0

Screen snap: http://tinyurl.com/njz9tvr

If the numbers were "0-1" it would make sense to me - that some sort of
error had been found and the count incremented.

But 1-0 and the repetition?

Can anybody shed some light?

Yup, I've seen those with HD Sentinel too many times. I think what's
happening here is that the drive is continuously doing self-tests, and
then after awhile a problem that it encountered before, is no longer
afflicting it, so it resets the value to zero.

The only difference between HD Sentinel and other SMART utilities is
that HD Sentinel is keeping a log of SMART errors, and it can see in the
history when certain numbers change. If the hard disk automatically
updates a value from failing to passing, you will probably see it
failing at one time, and then next time you reboot, you might notice
that it's no longer failing. This would just be a mysterious thing in
your mind, you'll say to yourself that you could've sworn you saw it was
failing at one time, and then dismiss it as your imagination. But HD
Sentinel actually keeps logs of these things, so when something like
this happens, you will have a record saying that "no, you're not crazy".

I'd say that if something like this happening continually over and over
again, that the disk has a weak sector which only acts up occasionally.

Yousuf Khan

In message , pjp
writes:
In article , lid
says...

The utility is called "Hard Disk Sentinel".

I don't know if the syntax is peculiar to that utility or is in general
use... but it sounds ominous to me.

There are two messages, repeated verbatim 4 times at different times of
day/dates:

#198 Off-Line Uncorrectable Sector Count 1-0
#197 Current Pending Sector Count 1-0

Screen snap: http://tinyurl.com/njz9tvr

If the numbers were "0-1" it would make sense to me - that some sort of
error had been found and the count incremented.

But 1-0 and the repetition?

Can anybody shed some light?

Well, looking at the actual words, "current pending sector" _could_ mean
"sectors currently awaiting reallocation", which is set back to 0 when
they actually _are_ reallocated?

When I see that as part of the drives SMART info I call and check
warranty after I start copying everything on it to another drive. This

That certainly doesn't hurt.

usually also tells you if anything is amiss with the actual data, e.g.
can't copy a specific file or access some folder ect.

I use a tool called DiskInfo to view smart data, both WD and Seagate
seem to restrict to only their own what drives they see.

See Paul's reply - but also note some SMART figures go down and some up,
and also I think different utilities - and possibly different
manufacturers - go different ways. For example, I use DiskCheckup
(http://www.passmark.com/) (which also stores the SMART figures every
time I run it), and that shows Reallocated Sector Count thus:
from 2010-8-15 to 2010-9-19 as 98, then from 2012-3-24 to 2014-3-30 (i.
e. just now) as 94. On a different tab it shows that same count as
Status: OK, Value: 94, Worst: 94, Threshold: 10, Raw Value: 59, and
Predicted TEC date as 2090-4-23 (which as it's my 130th birthday I'm not
too worried about). The main point of this tedious story is that this
particular parameter is going down for me, but up for Paul's utility (at
least for his "dud" drive). (All of the other 22 parameters show "N.A."
as the failure date, presumably meaning they're the same now as the
first time I ran the utility, so it can't predict anything from them.)

I think Yousuf's suggestion that you might have one weak spot that comes
and goes it plausible - assuming the drive's electronics actually
retries spots it has previously found to be dud, which surprises me a
little. Maybe it does once, and marks them OK if OK on the second try,
which is plausible (but just guesswork).
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

Odds are, the phrase "It's none of my business" will be followed by "but".

J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , pjp
writes:
In article , lid
says...

The utility is called "Hard Disk Sentinel".

I don't know if the syntax is peculiar to that utility or is in general
use... but it sounds ominous to me.

There are two messages, repeated verbatim 4 times at different times of
day/dates:

#198 Off-Line Uncorrectable Sector Count 1-0
#197 Current Pending Sector Count 1-0

Screen snap: http://tinyurl.com/njz9tvr

If the numbers were "0-1" it would make sense to me - that some sort of
error had been found and the count incremented.

But 1-0 and the repetition?

Can anybody shed some light?

Well, looking at the actual words, "current pending sector" _could_ mean
"sectors currently awaiting reallocation", which is set back to 0 when
they actually _are_ reallocated?

When I see that as part of the drives SMART info I call and check
warranty after I start copying everything on it to another drive. This

That certainly doesn't hurt.

usually also tells you if anything is amiss with the actual data, e.g.
can't copy a specific file or access some folder ect.

I use a tool called DiskInfo to view smart data, both WD and Seagate
seem to restrict to only their own what drives they see.

See Paul's reply - but also note some SMART figures go down and some up,
and also I think different utilities - and possibly different
manufacturers - go different ways. For example, I use DiskCheckup
(http://www.passmark.com/) (which also stores the SMART figures every
time I run it), and that shows Reallocated Sector Count thus:
from 2010-8-15 to 2010-9-19 as 98, then from 2012-3-24 to 2014-3-30 (i.
e. just now) as 94. On a different tab it shows that same count as
Status: OK, Value: 94, Worst: 94, Threshold: 10, Raw Value: 59, and
Predicted TEC date as 2090-4-23 (which as it's my 130th birthday I'm not
too worried about). The main point of this tedious story is that this
particular parameter is going down for me, but up for Paul's utility (at
least for his "dud" drive). (All of the other 22 parameters show "N.A."
as the failure date, presumably meaning they're the same now as the
first time I ran the utility, so it can't predict anything from them.)

I think Yousuf's suggestion that you might have one weak spot that comes
and goes it plausible - assuming the drive's electronics actually
retries spots it has previously found to be dud, which surprises me a
little. Maybe it does once, and marks them OK if OK on the second try,
which is plausible (but just guesswork).

The 98 number can be interpreted as "life remaining". It's a percentage.
Some of those numbers start at 200. But this one makes a nice percentage
thing.

Current Worst Threshold Data Status
Reallocated Sector Count 100 100 36 0 OK
Reallocated Sector Count 100 100 36 57 OK
Reallocated Sector Count 98 98 36 104 OK
^ ^
| |
Percentage Count

The value ("data") should be incrementing. It may not be an actual
count of sectors. There is no reason to believe 104 is actual
sectors. It could be 104,326 and in thousands. We'd never know.

And I have seen a case here, where a disk with a weak section,
no evidence of the weak section could be seen in SMART. As
far as SMART was concerned, the disk was fine and dandy. The
weak section could be detected with an HDTune bandwidth benchmark,
with the bad section having some 10MB/sec sections in it (i.e. slow).

The "Current Pending" are detected on read, and are logged.
On a write to the sector, the sector is checked. If the write
was successful, the sector can be taken off the list. If the
write fails, a substitution is done. And the sector is
removed from the list. If Current Pending is growing rapidly,
it could mean there aren't enough write attempts to allow pruning
the list. But it's a pretty bad sign.

The funny thing is, on the failing drives I've had here, I've
never seen anything in Current Pending, and all of my bad
news comes in the "Reallocated Sector Count" one. For whatever
reason, my substitutions seem to be happening on writes, with no
other notice. I have one bad drive here, if you write say 50GB of data,
that "value" field shown in the above example, will grow by about 50 or so.
And the Current Pending still doesn't show anything, as if
the parameter on that drive isn't even being used.

As for a post-mortem, I finally took apart one of my failed older drives,
to see why it failed. And there was a "gouge" in the middle of
the platter. A circular gouge. It appears the head lock jammed
in the locked position, the actuator tried to move the heads,
and the head assembly was ground into the platter. Leaving a
gouge mark. Funny stuff. No denying it's dead. Can't "buff out"
the gouge :-) There was surprisingly little other debris
inside the drive. The filter bags appeared to be clean.

Paul