UnrealIRCd Forums

Recently I have run an IDE DPS Self-Test on one of my HDD's, and it returned an error code 7. I was wondering if anyone knew what this error is, or how serious it is.

The drive is a Western Digital, 30 GB. The test was performed by a Compaq's BIOS. The drive seems to operate just fine at the moment.

Stealth wrote:Recently I have run an IDE DPS Self-Test on one of my HDD's, and it returned an error code 7. I was wondering if anyone knew what this error is, or how serious it is.

The drive is a Western Digital, 30 GB. The test was performed by a Compaq's BIOS. The drive seems to operate just fine at the moment.

It's an indication that your hard drive *might be* going bad. I would recommend running the datalifeguard tools found here

http://support.wdc.com/download/dlg/DlgDiagv504c.zip

here is the website for refrence
http://support.wdc.com/download/index.a ... 999&swid=2

as an additional precaution.. backup

(not exactly needed now anymore I guess, but good for new/other hds...)

Personally I use smartmontools on all my computers (both servers and desktops). It comes both with 'smartctl' (command line utility to give status reports, execute commands, etc) and 'smartd' (a monitoring daemon).
I have smartd configured to mail me if there's any problem (basicly I configure it like '/dev/hda -a -m my@email -T permissive' @ smartd.conf). Since some time they also have a windows version, which seems to work fine too :).

I usually don't run self-tests though, although it is capable of that, perhaps I'll switch that on if I'm bored [manual shows: '-s REGE Do self-test when type/date matches regular expression (see man page)', so that looks nice :p]. So far I only ran it manually a few times via smartctl.

I've looked in the past at several commercial tools, and although they look nicer, they were all $$$, and this one is free :).

Thanks for the reply. I will try the WD utility, and maybe it can give me a better description than "Error Code 7, Drive replacement recommended".