Disk health reporting features

Hard disks (specially mechanic ones) are very prone to fail, and we normally notice this when it is too late (data lost)

In Elive this is not a problem anymore, I have added as a login feature a checker of the disks health and reported to the user when this information changes, this a demo example of these 3 types of reports:

This is just, -amazing- (again)

:happybounce: :boogie::applause::1up::coding::cheerleader::dance:
:excited::eyepopping::happy_dance::madness::love::omgomgomg::surprise::shocked::wow:

4 Likes

Woooohhh.... effectively,it's amazing!!!! (again)

As much as I work with Elive I love it more and more, I'd tried in the past a lot of other distributions looking for a lightweight distro but no ones likes to me than Elive do, I discover Elive by hazard, thans a review in a website, an now I know Elive is the distribution I looked for a lot of years.

Thanks for build Elive and thanks to any people that helps Elive to exist everyday with their help!!!

3 Likes

Good idea but doesn't it slow down start up? :thinking:

NEVER !

Elive doesn't wants bottlenecks, slowdowns or resources wasting, so every implementation makes sure that this doesn't happens

For example: when you configure the network, you can see the gadget appear in your trayer, this application running takes 20MB extra of resources, it's useless to keep it opened since you have already configured your network, so if you check it, the application is automatically closed around 15 minutes later

The disk checker in question is a light tool that takes around 2 seconds to perform in the login of the desktop, and exits after that. I'm considering to include the feature to be run every hour or so, just because sometimes some people can run the desktop during days (there is a record of an old Elive user which ran Elive without reboot for more than 500 days lol :eyepopping:)

2 Likes

This could happen to me. Except the HDD wants to die.
You know the scene from Aliens, when Mary is found and whispering 'Please! K-Kill me!...'. Sometimes HDD reacts the same with less words. They're only say something like 'krrr krr quiee kr... click clack clack clack ...' Maybe a bad Klingon dialect. And now @Thanatermesis has found a way to translate this.

Sometimes I always forgot systems (physical and VM) that will run for weeks, until the monitoring is remembering me about a system with one or more CVE and need to be updated.
But until I am using Elive in 87% mobile (USB Live) and not always on my own hardware, I really appreciate this improvement!
I always thought about a way to start different profiles. One USB Stick for the own environment and a forensic or testing environment ... If I leave the room, nobody needs to see my emails, but I won't every time lock the screen, so the owner of the system can see a status. Today I'm using 3 Elive sticks.

1 Like

You can perfectly do that with different persistence partitions, in short, you need to repartition the USB with the partitions that you want to use (and configure them), and add a specific label to the formating, then you can add the boot parameter persistence-label=foo (probably) and should use that partition instead the other

Also, you can use persistence layers "one over the other", but this is more complex to do

By other side, using 3 different USB sticks is another way to do it, sounds more simple and fast, and since the USB's are pretty cheap today (a good sandisk ultra 32gb for example) to me sounds like a better & simpler option

Truly an amazing Linux system that beats Windows 10 hands down. Keep up the good work.

4 Likes

One question?......

How SMART works?

I asked so yesterday Elive says to me that my ACER had registered 1 shock..... but these morning it says to me that it has registered MORE THAN 65.000 SHOCKS..... I must say that my house has a lot of vibrations when a truck runs beside, but it's sounds very strange 65k G-shocks from one day to another. If not, SMART says that there aren't reallocated sectors and that HDD it's in a complete good health...

I doesn't understand anything....

Don't get confused about the Elive's message.
I guess it is probably a bit old age and may be does need an overhaul by Thantermesis ...
:sweat:

S.M.A.R.T. is for sure the more reliable information about the status from your harddisk.
Your computer is getting information from the build-in sensors of your harddisk.
:astonished:

Recommendation:
If you can, replace the mechanical Hard Disk with a so called SSD,
it is worth the effort in any case und will pay you back a thousand times.
(Yes, especially in 'old' computers!!!)
:rocket:

Kdrgds

2 Likes

it basically showed your total "up to today" counter, this means that these are the total shocks received since it exists, the strange thing is that it told you that was 1 shock and another day 65k, this doens't sounds very correct... you must verify yourself this data from palimpsest (gnome-disks) or from:

smartctl -s on -A /dev/sda

(do this for all your disks, sdb, sdc...) you have multiple data shown, check if the total shocks corresponds to the scanned ones by the elive feature (which get's the results from the smart data, so should be the same)

not reallocated sectors is the most important part for its health :slight_smile:

S.M.A.R.T. is an acronym. It means self monitoring analysis reporting technology. It is a system tool used to indicate healthy or bad sdd or hdd. Solid State Drives are faster and more reliable than mechanical (spinning disc) if you want additional information go internet and type.

2 Likes

= Agreed & confirmed in full :wink:

I think it was a bug, I ran now smartctl that says me 0 shocks, and 0 reallocated sectors, the Elive system disk tools at main menu say the same (both zero)ut yesterday both Elive prevention window at start and disk tools showed me the same value (between 65 and 66k shocks and zero sectors reallocated), and before yesterday both prevention Elive prevention window and disk tools saw me that there has been 1 G-shock.....
Maybe my HDD is old enough to not completely and correctly support SMART?

if is supported, it will show the values, if not supported, it will say "zero"

Mmmh, this issue is strange, let's wait and see if the number changes, then, compare the elive reports with the disks tool reports to see if they are the same

You can verify the reports by elive doing this:

cat /etc/elive/disks-health

They are at the moment only generated one time per boot

Interesting feature, by the way :hugs: