Repetitive popup warning that my hard drive has problems in Fedora 15

Question

I keep getting a popup warning that I have disk problems after upgrading to Fedora 15. I checked the utility and it seems one of my devices has "many bad sectors". What am I supposed to do about this? Is there a way to figure out what is on that particular device (it says it's mapped to /dev/sda, but I'm not sure how to use that information to figure out what, is on that drive)?

Answer 1

If you have only one hard drive installed in your system then /dev/sda will be the designation for that drive. /dev/sda1 would designate the first partition on the /dev/sdadrive.

If you have many bad sectors on the drive then what you can do it to try and back up to any media you can, buy a new drive, install that and then restore your operating system and important files to that drive.

Working on a drive that is actively telling you that it is failing is just asking for trouble.

For some nice backup/restore solutions, try looking at How to backup/restore in Fedora 13? (Granted it's for F13, but I'd expect it to still be reasonably relevant.

-=EDIT=-

In order to find out what drive you are actually working from in Fedora (so you can tell whether you need to be concerned) I would open a terminal and use the command

cat /etc/mtab

Which will tell you what filesystems are mounted, somewhat like this excerpt from Wikipedia:

 /dev/sdb1 / ext3 rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 0
 proc /proc proc rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0
 /sys /sys sysfs rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0

This should give you an idea of which partitions/drive your Fedora install is operating from. The first two columns are all you really care about as they tell you the device and the point in the filesystem that they are mounted at.