Webif - red hard disc warning

[Black Hole]

Now here's a question to throw at you all. Would it not be possible to include a simple web browser on the web interface? That way we could access any catch up service?? Just a thought.

Anything that is ported to the HDR-FOX CF has to be specifically compiled for it, and trying to compile a major software app like a web browser (no such thing as a simple one these days - it would need to support HTML5 and goodness knows what else, gone are the days of plain text web browsing) would run into problems of all the necessary libraries being available as well. It would be a major undertaking... and in the end doomed to failure because there are no built-in standard drivers for accessing the video and audio outputs and no data for providing such. That's why everything CF is managed through a network connection and not on-screen. And the processor wouldn't be powerful enough or have enough memory.

Your best route would be such as the Google Chromecast or Amazon Fire TV Stick.

Meanwhile, stop procrastinating and replace the disk.

 

[MontysEvilTwin]

Fixdisk may sort out any filesystem problems you may have but it can't fix your disk. You have over 5000 reallocated sectors. As they have been reallocated successfully (no pending sectors) the disk will still work properly, but it could fail suddenly. It may last a while longer, but I would copy anything you want to keep.
Work has been done on custom portals in the past but there is nothing new in the pipeline, as far as I know.

 

[Suffolkboy]

Thanks everyone for your suggestions. I've still not run fixdisk but do plan to do so although from what you say it won't fix bad sectors. Would a re format do anything?

As I (thought) I understood it - a sector can be marked bad if there is a read / write error detected. HD repair utilities try read / writing to a sector and if successful mark the sector as good again - is that correct?

I have "smartmontools" installed - what impact would removing this package have?

 

[prpr]

I have "smartmontools" installed - what impact would removing this package have?

You'd get sand in your hair.

 

[MartinLiddle]

As I (thought) I understood it - a sector can be marked bad if there is a read / write error detected. HD repair utilities try read / writing to a sector and if successful mark the sector as good again - is that correct?

The problem with your hard drive is that the sectors aren't marked as bad; they are marked as reallocated which means that the hard controller itself has decided that the sectors are no longer usable, and has replaced them from its pool of spare sectors. I don't think HD repair utilities can do anything about this and the issue you face is that the hard drive will at some point run out of spare sectors to use.

 

[Black Hole]

Thanks everyone for your suggestions. I've still not run fixdisk but do plan to do so although from what you say it won't fix bad sectors. Would a re format do anything?

As I (thought) I understood it - a sector can be marked bad if there is a read / write error detected. HD repair utilities try read / writing to a sector and if successful mark the sector as good again - is that correct?

I have "smartmontools" installed - what impact would removing this package have?

Your knowledge is somewhat out of date. Formatting a drive simply writes a file system into the blank storage offered by the storage medium, without any real testing of the medium (except for a success/fail report from the drive controller for each sector written). Low-level formatting is the process of checking each sector and updating a table of U/S sectors, but that's best left to the manufacturer in this day and age (and probably always was - but in the early days of home computers HDDs were very expensive and one tried anything to get some more life out of it).

Modern drives have a self-healing mechanism through the SMART stuff, they monitor their own performance and when a faulty sector is spotted it gets swapped out - that's the "sectors reallocated" count in the SMART stats. "Pending" are sectors detected faulty but not yet reallocated for one reason or another, and "uncorrectable" is the count of sectors which couldn't be reallocated because they are in a critical area of disk or the cache of spare sectors has run out.

The drive is at end of life when your counts start ramping up; a few hundred or even a few thousand reallocated isn't a problem as long as it is stable. My original 2010 HDR-FOX still shows zero reallocated.

fix-disk corrects file system errors. The file system is essentially a huge database, and if the operating system loses track of the indexing information used for quick access to the data that constitutes each file, it will slow down dramatically trying to work out where everything is. fix-disk checks for indexing inconsistencies and rebuilds the indexes if necessary - this is nothing to do with the physical formatting of the disk.

 

[af123]

A couple of tweaks to the above:

"Pending" are sectors detected faulty but not yet reallocated

They're just suspected as faulty by the drive firmware. When they're next written to it decides whether it was a real problem.

Edited extract from http://www.hdsentinel.com/hard_disk_case_weak_sectors.php as it's a good summary

Hard disk weak sectors
A "weak sector" or "pending sector" (the same but with different name) is a sector where the CRC check showed problems on a read operation, but (currently) no physical problem encountered. The drive marks such sector as "pending sector" and on next write operation(s) the drive verifies the status of the corresponding sector to confirm if it can be re-used or not.

If things are good, the drive sector could read back and there are no signs of problems, then the status of the sector set back to normal (the number of such weak sectors may decrease and there is no re-allocation). But if this verification shows failure, then the drive starts the reallocation process and marks the sector as bad - to completely disable its later use and re-direct all further reads and writes to the spare area instead. Then the number of bad (reallocated) sectors may increase.

Usually, weak sectors can be caused by

• real drive failure (error with internal memory, problem with drive head or surface)
• power loss (the write operation could not be completed because of power loss)
• power failure (weak power supply or not stable power line)
• data cable failure or improper connection (usually cause also communication errors)
• system memory or motherboard problem
  
• general overheating of the motherboard, chipset, hard disk controller

...in most cases the weak sectors do not indicate real problems with the hard disk. As a side effect, chkdsk may detect bad sectors on the actual partition (logical drive) and marks them as bad to prevent accessing that particular logical drive area. However, this is not the best solution because chkdsk does not repair the hard disk drive itself, only the partition (the logical drive). It means that if a re-partition and re-format would be ever required, the problems are still there, the problematic sectors would be used again, they may cause data loss / corruption again and re-running chkdsk may find them again - a vicious circle.

fix-disk corrects file system errors.

Before it does that, it tries to fix any pending sectors by forcing a write to them. Obviously this causes data loss for that sector - often not a problem in the middle of a video file (probably more noticeable with 4K sector disks!)

 

[af123]

the issue you face is that the hard drive will at some point run out of spare sectors to use.

It must be imminent because the drive has set the overall SMART status flag to FAILED. In this case it almost definitely means that the drive is very low on spare sectors.