How to stop Ubuntu 9.10 from showing hard disk failing notification?

Question

Everytime I start Ubuntu I get a warning message that says my hard disk is failing. Big deal, it's just a warning, I'm a programmer, I ignore warnings (kidding).

On a more serious note: I've already backed up all my data that I need, but I gonna continue to use this computer until it explodes dag napbit! So how do I tell Ubuntu that I don't care and make it stop showing me the warning?

Answer 1

I'm not completely sure if you're experiencing the same kind of message that i did, but i was told that my disk has many bad sectors, so this is how i removed the warning message:

1. Open the Disk Utility from System > Administration > Disk Utility (or maybe a click on the warning will open it?)
2. Choose the disk that is failing and click the More Information link. (The link is placed to the red text that is showing you the warning)
3. Set a mark in the Don't warn me if the disk is failing-checkbox just above the attributes in the bottom of the window.

I sincerely hope this will solve all of your problems.

Answer 2

It would have been nice to know what was generating the warning, without any further information i search launchpad for 'hard disk failing notification', and found this

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-disk-utility/+bug/412440

which led me to this

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-disk-utility/+bug/412152

Which apparently had major work done on 2009-09-19. Makes me wonder if you're up to date. If not, update apt-get update; apt-get install devicekit-disks. If so, there should be a way with this update to disable the notification on a per device basis.

I'd suggest first following the pattern by https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-disk-utility/+bug/412152/comments/32 before you jump to disable the notification.

Answer 3

Perhaps disabling disk checking for the partitions on that drive would stop the errors. You can simply change the pass-num field in /etc/fstab to 0 for that disk to prevent fsck from checking the specified partitions at startup. A typical fstab looks like this:

device name   mount point     fs-type      options           dump-freq pass-num
LABEL=/         /               ext3         defaults                1 1
/dev/hda6       swap            swap         defaults                0 0
none            /dev/pts        devpts       gid=5,mode=620          0 0
none            /proc           proc         defaults                0 0
none            /dev/shm        tmpfs        defaults                0 0
/dev/cdrom      /mount/cdrom    udf,iso9660  noauto,owner,kudzu,ro   0 0

for each partition that resides on /dev/hda for example, change it's pass-num value to 0 to disable checking. You could disable checking on all of them for one reboot and see if that does anything.

Answer 4

Seems like an old post, but just to keep it up to date....

I had the same problem with my Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and things seem to have changed a little.

In Ubuntu 12.04 you need to start disk utility as well, but then you should choose the drive that is experiencing errors, and then go on the link "smart Data" and you will find the box "Don't warn me if disk is failing"

Hope this is going to be helpful for a few others out there with newer versions of Ubuntu.

Answer 5

Disabling or overriding the udisks probe for ATA SMART support udev rule will prevent Gnome Disk Utility 3.0.2 (Ubuntu 12.04 in my case) from showing the hard disk failing notification. From the comments at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/574462/comments/7 this workaround acceptable.

Create a file with the following contents at /etc/udev/rules.d/81-udisks-no-ata-smart.rules so that it overrides /lib/udev/rules.d/80-udisks.rules.

# Force all disk probes to return not ATA SMART capable so that a drive with SMART  
# failures does not trigger Gnome Disk Utility to display a pop-up warning message. 
# Note: Some programs that rely on udisks to perform SMART checks may not work. 
#       However, manual SMART reads (e.g. using smartctl) are not be affected.

# USB ATA enclosures with a SAT layer
KERNEL=="sd*[!0-9]", ATTR{removable}=="0", ENV{ID_BUS}=="usb", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="disk", ENV{UDISKS_ATA_SMART_IS_AVAILABLE}="0"

# ATA disks driven by libata
KERNEL=="sd*[!0-9]", ATTR{removable}=="0", ENV{ID_BUS}=="ata", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="disk", ENV{UDISKS_ATA_SMART_IS_AVAILABLE}="0"

# ATA disks connected via SAS (not driven by libata)
KERNEL=="sd*[!0-9]", ATTR{removable}=="0", ENV{ID_BUS}=="scsi", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="disk", ENV{ID_VENDOR}=="ATA", ENV{UDISKS_ATA_SMART_IS_AVAILABLE}="0"