So my dying hard disk passes the long (takes hours to run) Seagate drive self test. That means it can’t be put in for a warranty replacement despite the bad sectors I found. The Seagate program I found doesn’t even report on how many sectors have been remapped. If it did that I’d at least have some idea about how long it had left (eg. 10 bad sectors when the remap pool has 10,000 entries is not a big deal but 9,000 bad sectors is).
It seems a bit strange to me that despite known errors I can’t get the drive replaced. I guess the official line would be along the lines of “we design for some defects to happen in the field” but both my experience and the experience of other people I’ve talked to indicates that once you notice bad sectors there’s a high probability that the drive will die quite quickly. I can only hope that doesn’t happen to me.
Given that the drive claims to be ok I’m going to continue using it (a new drive just isn’t on the budget right now). I’ll try to do more regular backups and I’ll monitor the results a bit better. The only problem now is knowing what files I need to replace on the restored filesystem. I’ve already reinstalled the data files from Jedi Knight and confirmed that the game works but I know that Blade Runner has a bad data file and I’m not sure what other files might be bad. The problem is that I can’t get read errors to let me know of problems anymore and I’m not at all sure how to detect data corruption in files (that should be the filesystem’s job, I can’t wait for ZFS support in Mac OS X!). I think I might just start from a clean install and re-install the games again. It’s not like I’ve got tons of programs or updates installed.
