hi there

Just a quick question, I have been getting various soft and hard errors being generated on disks on various machines (as im sure we all do). i was wondering other than checking "iostat -En" for the number and frequency of errors, and "prtdiag" for general hardware status, what else is there I can do to further investigate disk errors without taking the box down to do diagnostics (these boxes are live and downtime is almost impossible). Any additional tools or tips that would help me would be great. Eg: I have htis error generated on a sparc box

Error for Command: write(10)               Error Level: Retryable
scsi: [ID 107833 kern.notice]    Requested Block: 3603180             Error Block: 36031808
scsi: [ID 107833 kern.notice]    Vendor: SEAGATE                      Serial Number: 0327A23Y8
scsi: [ID 107833 kern.notice]        Sense Key: Hardware Error
scsi: [ID 107833 kern.notice]        ASC: 0x19 (defect list error), ASCQ: 0x0, FRU: 0x2

Normally to analyze disk

command format --> choose disk that may be error -->analyze-->read--> wait untill it finish , it will show you about block error or show at messages at /var/adm

As per goasutlor's post but choose, format -> analyze -> refresh

You need to choose refresh rather than read, as the error you posted is for a write issue, format / analyze / read, will only check that it can read that or any other block, not write to it......, so you won't get the full picture as to the health of your disk