On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 2:16 AM, Gordon Ferris <gordon.fer...@wfengineering.com> wrote: > 1. Is it normal for the operating system to freeze when accessing damaged sectors - even if the only access is via a raw, unmounted partition? This seems like a hardware problem to me, except that errors are logged to /var/log/messages as I described in the original post.
Yes. It may not be desirable, but the retry code basically puts everything else on hold while it's running. It is a hardware problem the operating system is trying to overcome. > 2. What utilities will show which sectors are occupied by specific files? Ideally I could specify a range of sectors and a list of files using those sectors would be provided. It would also be nice to specify files and be shown which sectors they occupy. I've heard of the Coroner's Toolkit; are there any other recommendations? I don't know of any. If I needed to do something like this, I'd probably start with fsck_ffs and modify as needed. Actually, that's what fsdb does already. You probably just need it to print a little more info and to walk the tree automatically.