I'd actually rather try to save the drive, but I don't know if that is possible?? If it would require a specialist, I'll just request the replacement but I'd like to avoid waiting on shipping if this disk can be saved... I know it's dicey, let alone for a n00b, but I'll try anything that doesn't void my warranty!
The drive is two years old, it's wearing out. Is there a way for me to determine if it's too worn out to bother with?
I heeded the warning in your first reply - warning that chkdsk was / is dangerous. I removed the chkdsk + repair I'd scheduled and haven't run it since. Also, I inferred your meaning included chkdsk-type utils, admin level, command line etc disk utilities as posing the same general danger to a disk as sick as mine. (Not a moment too soon, by the way, I would have tried gpart after chkdsk!) I have only used light-touch utilities like hddscan on Vista, and Smartmontools and Disk Usage Analyzer etc on *nix.
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but - is gpart bad juju as well? What if the disk health improves and stabliizes (ie, as I fix problems manually?)
This might be an excess of optimism but smartctl -a /dev/sda4 - the first tests reported the drive situation as critically bad, much worse than hddscan was finding - scary bad reports like the one below, almost everything failing or pre-fail and Disk Usage Util's graphic representation of the disk and the partitions amounts to a giant adhesive ball of garbage (93% trash/// deleted shares piling up in the trash.)
Vista's file structure blind spot - hddscan SMART can't see past it, and Vista is blind to the mountain of bad files Ubuntu's auto indexer is choking on. Or that's what I'm pretty sure is happening, gonna find out!! Anyway, testing smartctl -a /dev/sda4 during cleaning showed immediate, dramatic improvement of the overall disk health. Once the bad data was gone, testing the disk and individual partitions showed overall pass, all fields had stablizied with pass / old age, except of course reallocated sectors.
.....Or not. I just ran a test and it's doing it again - critical degradation. I HAVE to cut the legs off this thing, so I'm going to drop Samba right now and then indexing for Ubuntu.
Could I use gpart to just drop the Samba partition completely? If resizing is inadvisable, the space could remain unallocated - one less dead zone for my confused old disk to hide zombie data and then try to make it searcheable. Assuming the disk could reasonably handle being repartitioned I mean.
Here's the brand new, very very bad test. Bad data being populated in bad locations, perhaps causing the metadata to return unknowns?
satyrwilder@Jolly-Roger:~$ sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda4
sudo: unable to resolve host Jolly-Roger
[sudo] password for satyrwilder:
smartctl version 5.37 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-6 Bruce Allen
Home page is
http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/satyrwilder@Jolly-Roger:~$ sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda4
sudo: unable to resolve host Jolly-Roger
[sudo] password for satyrwilder:
smartctl version 5.37 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-6 Bruce Allen
Home page is
http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model: WDC WD10EACS-00ZJB0
Serial Number: WD-WCASJ1075786
Firmware Version: 01.01B01
User Capacity: 1,000,204,886,016 bytes
Device is: Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is: 8
ATA Standard is: Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated
Local Time is: Tue Mar 30 19:27:55 2010 CDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Disabled
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
See vendor-specific Attribute list for marginal Attributes.
General SMART Values:
Offline data collection status: (0x00) Offline data collection activity
was never started.
Auto Offline Data Collection: Disabled.
Total time to complete Offline
data collection: ( 0) seconds.
Offline data collection
capabilities: (0x00) Offline data collection not supported.
SMART capabilities: (0x0000) Automatic saving of SMART data is not implemented.
Error logging capability: (0x00) Error logging supported.
General Purpose Logging supported.
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 17018
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
255 Unknown_Attribute 0x373f 200 016 063 Pre-fail Always In_the_past 69269232549888
45 Unknown_Attribute 0x4344 087 083 068 Old_age Offline - 60680225567041
54 Unknown_Attribute 0x0038 000 000 056 Old_age Offline FAILING_NOW 52983538659968
66 Unknown_Attribute 0x3131 048 068 049 Pre-fail Offline FAILING_NOW 53151365537879
65 Unknown_Attribute 0x5345 067 048 069 Pre-fail Offline FAILING_NOW 35503310133805
32 Unknown_Attribute 0x2020 032 032 032 Old_age Offline FAILING_NOW 35322350018592
32 Unknown_Attribute 0x2020 032 032 032 Old_age Offline FAILING_NOW 550026354720
16 Unknown_Attribute 0x3f00 000 016 000 Old_age Offline FAILING_NOW 280379776891900
255 Unknown_Attribute 0x000f 000 007 015 Pre-fail Always FAILING_NOW 131943408599808
120 Unknown_Attribute 0x7800 000 000 000 Old_age Offline FAILING_NOW 0
64 Unknown_Attribute 0xfe00 001 000 000 Old_age Offline In_the_past 39030002838272
104 Unknown_Attribute 0x4174 190 035 116 Old_age Offline In_the_past 147336810495809
226 Load-in_Time 0x034e 001 061 078 Old_age Always FAILING_NOW 150
150 Unknown_Attribute 0x0016 000 000 022 Old_age Always FAILING_NOW 0
SMART Error Log Version: 122
Invalid Error Log index = 0x42 (T13/1321D rev 1c Section 8.41.6.8.2.2 gives valid range from 1 to 5)
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 17018
Warning: ATA Specification requires self-test log structure revision number = 1
No self-tests have been logged. [To run self-tests, use: smartctl -t]
Device does not support Selective Self Tests/Logging
Again, thanks to everyone for your input and advice!