A few weeks ago a client was having problems with his Dell system and specifically he had file system corruption (Windows XP Home) which required a repair install of his OS. I noticed that the event logger logged a "disk bad block" event about the time of the corruption of his file system and I recommended he consider replacing the drive. I also noticed that he had 69 days left on his Dell warranty and suggested he call Dell to see if they would give him a replacement drive (80 GB Seagate Barracuda ATA IV model). Dell had the customer run the short diagnostic and when it passed they told the customer they wouldn't replace the drive. He then bought a 160 GB Maxtor drive which I mirrored against his old drive and the system has been running fine since. He gave me the old drive and I had a chance recently to run the Seagate diagnostics. Although it passed the short diagnostic it suggested running the long thorough diagnostic. The drive failed the long diagnostic finding 12 bad sectors at high LBA addresses. The diagnostic also said that it could attempt to relocate/zero the bad sectors but it failed on all 12 of the bad sectors it found previously.
This brings me to the question - is the drive really bad? I recall that years ago all drives had bad blocks which could be mapped out by the OS. Windows doesn't seem to do this but I'm wondering if Linux can still map out the bad blocks? Any opinions? The Seagate site doesn't definitively state that a drive with bad sectors is necessarily a bad drive... -Alex _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
