[Techtalk] Different usage betweed df and du

[Mary]

On Wed, Jul 13, 2005, Sue Stones wrote:
> Oh dear, I did smell a little burning last week, but couldn't find where 
> it came from.  I don't really have a back up so that's not much help.  I 
> had better make one though if this disc is about to fail.  I hope it 
> lasts a bit longer, I can't afford to replace it at the moment.  This 
> seems like the most likely option.

One thing you could check is how healthy the disk thinks it is:

smartctl -a /dev/hda [replace /dev/hda with your disks name if
necessary]

This will tell you quite a lot about the health of your disk: in
particular see if the Reallocated_Sector_Ct value looks unhealthy. (If
there's a significant number of sectors waiting for reallocation, that
will be because the disk can only reallocate sectors when you write to
them.)

-Mary