On 28 Mar 2015, at 16:14 , Michael <keybou...@gmail.com> wrote: > So my external 500 GB drive is giving me I/O errors. I'd like some advice,
Easy! > other than "throw it away”. Oh. Well. Fine, be that way. > This is a USB drive. I don't know how to do a low-level format. dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdisk1 bs=512 This will take AGES. Possibly on the order of days. (NB: it will take longer if you leave out that r that looks like a typo but is not. /dev/rdisk1 is correct). That will force a zero to be written to every block, allowing the disk to map bad blocks. Modern disks don’t do “low level” formatting. > My current "best" thinking is to force random writes to the whole disk > (there's a diskutil command for that), and if that works without errors, and > a read of the disk (cat /dev/rdisk1) works without errors, then whatever > happened is probably "transient" enough to resume use of the drive. Meh. *I* would not trust it. Once modern drives start to fail, they generally continue to fail. > I do have a time machine backup, so excluding the concern of files suffering > bitrot on the backup drive, I'm good -- nothing is lost. This drive is USB > powered, so it's nice to have with a portable laptop. > > Advice? Anyone? You can get a much larger drive for under $100. Just saying… -- Is this the light of a new day dawning? A future bright that you can walk in? No, it's just another Monday Morning, do it all over again! _______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list MacOSX-talk@omnigroup.com http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
