two for two: ATA smart false positives?

[gpk]

I've just upgraded two computers to Karmic, and both have given me a
"One or more disks are failing" warning on initial login.
I presume it comes from the ATA Smart monitoring stuff, but when
you click on the warning, you get a window that calls itself "Palimpsest."

One machine was oldish (3 year old disk) but one was newish
(1 year old). It seems a little surprising that two for two
disks were really ready to fail.

Have other people had similar experiences?

In my case, the most suspicious numbers on the palimpsest
display are the number of remapped sectors: respectively
a dozen or so, and 2.

Or, so it seems. Actually the "reallocated sector" line is
this: ID=5, reallocated sector count, current=199, worst=199,
threshold=140, "3 Sectors", Green, "OK", "Pre-fail", "online".

This makes no sense! Green and pre-fail? How does
199 turn into 3 sectors? (Odd. It was 2 when I started typing
this bug report...) (The current value is 198 now! How can it
go down???)

But it also tells me that 2.94 seconds to spin-up is "pre-fail".
Weird.

And the "Temperature" line. It says "current=100", "worst=88".
What's going on?

Either this is producing random numbers, or the GUI designer
has some serious explaining to do... I don't understand any
of the output from this program.

And the start-stop count! It says
ID=4, "Start/Stop Count", current=100, Worst=100, threshold=0,
value=4, grey, N/A, Old-Age, online.
Completely bonkers! I've stopped it more than 4 times.
Pretty certainly more than 100 times. Neither is right and
how do you get from one to the other. Anyway, neither
4 nor 100 start/stop cycles counts as "Old-Age".

And that ID=9 "power on hours", which has a value of 93
corresponds to 232 days (which is about right) and this
is a sign of "Old-age". Not in my book!

$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu karmic (development branch)
Release: 9.10
$

[Petr Jakes (petr-jakes-tpc)]

Similar symptoms in the Bug #425268: