[plug] lilo error message 0x40 and BIOS data check successful

[Craig Ringer]

Clare Johnstone wrote:

>       Thanks for that too. I do have one called Ultimatel Boot CD,
>      which has the IBM/Hitachi hdd tester on it which finds nothing wrong.

Do be aware that many manufactuer's disk tools are very conservative in 
their diagnoses, and disinclined to say "hmm, this one might be on its 
way out."

I've had the Western Digital disk tools report a disk as "having 
problems, but fixed" when it was developing thousands of bad sectors a 
day and became unmountable the next day.

smartmontools will give you a much more accurate picture, as the disks' 
internal self-tests tend to give truthful diagnosics. Running a test 
then looking at the test results (smartctl -l selftest /dev/hda) is 
often much more useful. You can't trust `smartctl -H /dev/hda' though - 
it reports the disk's overall health status, which in my experience also 
tends to be excessively conservative.

The information in the vendor specific section of the smartctl is harder 
to interpret, but can be extremely informative too. Uncorrectable 
sectors, for example, can be an indication of problems, and if the 
number is growing over time the disk is in my experience certainly on 
its way out.

--
Craig Ringer