I'm using ubuntu 11.04. Disk utility is reporting I have a bad sector on my hard drive. Is this reliable?
I'm skeptical that it's reporting accurately because
- When I googled "ubuntu disk utility bad sectors," it brought me to this bug:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libatasmart/+bug/438136?comments=all - I've scanned the drive with the manufacturer's tool (Seagate Seatools) and it didn't report any errors
- I scanned the drive with a couple other tools and they didn't report any errors
- Running fdisk and ntfsfix didn't find anything (other than ntfsinfo saying that my windows volume was "scheduled for check")
Disk utility is reporting some crazy numbers in other places: the read error rate is over 60 million (yet still green), the seek error rate is over 150 billion (yet still green), hardware ECC recovered is over 84 million (again, green). see these screenshots:
Edit: wikipedia's entry for SMART has this to say for each of these attributes: "The raw value has different structure for different vendors and is often not meaningful as a decimal number."
Having said all that, my windows partition has become unbootable (ntoskrnl.exe missing or corrupted, etc.) multiple times over the last several years, and other than the fact that windows is relatively unreliable, bad sectors would explain why it keeps messing up.
What's the best way to determine whether or not there really is anything wrong with the drive?