[AncientDragonfly]

Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker

The first MHDD results look fine. The second do not. For a new drive <150ms results are normal, <500ms are hmmish, and >500ms are definitely not OK.

The first one was from when I first got the (first) replacement drive home, before I did anything else with it (except for putting it in the case).

This is not uncommon by the way, the drive you received probably isn't new but a refurbished (repaired) drive, IIRC you can actually see that on the Seagate label (Or at least the mfgr. date). There is a good reason why I test RMA drives

I didn't see anything on it that indicated it might be a refurbished drive, but I had gotten a feeling when they gave it to me that it might be a good idea to test it first, probably because I didn't want to reinstall everything on another disk that might turn out to be bad. Then it went bad over the month, after I had reinstalled everything.

I guess I am actually pretty lucky because I've never had a disk be bad when I got it, or go bad soon afterwards; in fact I still have a 1gb disk still in use occasionally.

You should A reallocated means the data on that sector is lost. This could be anythiing from a random file in /tmp to /boot/kernel
Also, it's my experience that once you have 1 reallocated sector, others start showing up soon (Not always, but often).

Well, I will from now on! And at least this process has taught me what it takes to get the stuff from a dying drive onto a new one, and how to back up absolutely everything, instead of just my irreplaceable stuff.

As a sidenote, there's smartmontools in ports to monitor SMART data and send emails or something after something happens. Very useful for servers and stuff to monitor and preventing problems/unplanned downtime (As we say in Dutch "voorkomen is beter dan genezen", meaning: Preventing is better than curing ).

smartmontools is compiled, needs setting up now. Thanks. We have a saying like that here too, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

Anyway, any computer store worth it's money will replace this drive, even if the official tool says the drive is OK. If they give you problems you can also return the drive yourself on the Seagate website, this does take about a week though while the store may replace it immediately.

The store wanted to give me a Hitachi as a replacement, but since I already replaced it, they gave me the money back. At first the tech guy grilled me about if I had mounted it in the case with screws (hahaha!), then a lot of talking I didn't understand (Korean, I think) took place between him and the older woman who has been seeing me in the store periodically for years. Then he went and tested it. I explained to her that I had already bought a replacement because I needed to put the data somewhere instead of reinstalling and configuring everything for the 3rd time. She told me that out of the 100 they had gotten in and sold, I was the only one who had returned them. I figure the other buyers either don't know yet, or they just think Windows screwed up again. I guess all the disk-intensive compiling with FreeBSD is a good preliminary test.

Anyway, now that that's all settled, is there an easy one-step way to make sure everything on the new disk that was dumped from the bad disk is complete, and if not, to get it that way?