Okay so it seems the disk is not faulty, the problem was with the SATA cable I used. A new, sealed, faulty cable. I found this out when I moved the “good” disk on the “faulty” one’s slot, and used the same cable as for that one… It also started behaving badly.
After replacing the cable with another tested one, I was able to pass badblocks on both disks.
And now, time to install!
Good news then I guess, even though the factory that made it has obviously failed in their QA testing 😛 Just goes to show how one small little thing can cause so much grief (and set you back as well).I haven’t been following all your posts in the past but it seems like something similar that I will be doing soon: software raid with SATA/SATAII (w/hotpug support)?.I will be watching this blog very closely 🙂
I’m glad to see you’re well enough again to start having cranky computer problems. ;)I’ve had the same thing happen to me a few times now, and each time it is the last place I would have expected an issue, but happily enough that’s all it was and not the harddrive.
SO, does this mean that your old hard disks that were declared as faulty might be working after all ?It might be prudent to check them and use them as spare…
No, in this case smartctl test performed well anyway, while on the disk that was faulty before the smartctl test was failing too… it might be solved by the low-level format from Seatools, for what I gathered, but for that I need to copy all the data first.