I came back tonight after leaving Calibre fetching metadata/covers for 4,000 ebooks to find my PC was frozen – even after reinstalling with Fedora 13 not 14.

It passed memtest86 (RAM), it passed mprime (CPU), it didn’t pass smartctl (HDD) ………

SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num  Test_Description    Status                  Remaining  LifeTime(hours)  LBA_of_first_error
# 1  Extended offline    Completed: read failure       90%      3121         231943665

Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       2
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0030   200   200   000    Old_age   Offline      -       2

So 2 uncorrectable sectors and the self-test couldn’t even get past 10% before failing to read the disk!

So yet another WD hard disk to be RMA’d. Luckily its a WD Caviar Black, so has a 5 year warranty – in fact its just about to come to its first birthday (odd as I bought it from ebuyer in September!) The problem is I don’t want a replacement, I want my fscking money back. Its been a massive waste of my time and I wouldn’t even trust a replacement to be a backup drive.

I guess I’m running out of disk space on it anyway, so will stick the recently replaced WD Caviar Green 1.5Tb in its place (and hope that doesn’t fail) although I expect its a fair bit slower (5400rpm/32mb instead of 7200rpm/64mb) and is a 4K drive.

Now the question is, do I restore my Fedora 14 image……