On 9/4/20 3:50 PM, golinux@??? wrote:
> Well . . . I decided to run an fsck on the misbehaving harddrive. It
> started off by identifying the errors and rewriting them and then went
> through Free block counts, Inode bitmap differences and Free inodes and
> directory count. Some snippets of the output are posted below. I did not
> stick around to watch all of it so may have missed something. It took a
> long time to sort itself!

Out of curiosity, was it connected via eSATA or USB? I forgot what kind
of dock you got.

...
>
> When it finished, I mounted the drive without issue and could read the
> remaining directories and files.  However the /media/xxxxxx/cstwo/600
> directory mentioned in the original mounting error below was nowhere to
> be found:
>
> "Error when getting information for file '/media/xxxxxx/cstwo/600':
> Input/output error."

It's possible that data is not actually gone and can be recovered if you
know what you are looking for. However, as you stated, you have a copy
of the data elsewhere.

>
> Then I ran the SMART Short offline test and it completed without error
>
> I have no idea how reliable the repaired drive is after this radical
> surgery. Can it be written to or files deleted? Should I even try?

From my experience, SMART data is reliable. To give some idea, I have
experience with over a hundred disks since they started to include
SMART. So probably not that much compared to others on this list.

I would say there is no problem with the underlying disk and the
corruption occurred at the filesystem level, which is one reason an
entire directory is missing, rather than at the disk level. If you want
more assurance, run the long test. You can get some idea of how quickly
your drive is deteriorating by monitoring changes to the SMART data
(smartd). I've been able to predict failure before it happens. It's
never been sudden. So if your disk "PASSED" it's probably fine to use it.

Modern disk drives will move your data to good sectors when it detects
failure looming in bad sectors. So head failure is an issue, and can
also be predicted by SMART data. Mishandling of drives is something that
SMART can't predict of course. ;)

Best regards,

Simon