Comment 104 for bug 438136

Please check the associated skdump save file. This is an old 20GB laptop drive. In the latest Ubuntu 9.10 they ship with 0.16 of libatasmart. I think this drive is incorrectly flagged as failing, because the lib relies on the raw value being a single raw48 value. This then looks like very many (262166) bad blocks.

Using "smartctl -a /dev/sda" I get the following extracts:

SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 005 Pre-fail Always - 262166
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 4

If I use the -v 5,raw8 option
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 005 Pre-fail Always - 0 0 0 4 0 22

If I use the -v 5,raw16 option
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 005 Pre-fail Always - 0 4 22

The attribute is being read as raw48, which in this case looks to be completely wrong. Using the different raw# value seems to tie in with attribute 196.

It could be argued that if you cannot rely on the format of the raw value, you should not base warnings off it, and only use the normalized, worst and threshold values. I'm technical, and I damn near junked a relatives old but still serviceable laptop because of this.