>From the mists of youth I remember a MS-DOS based utility that formatted and defragmented the hard drive. On one occasion I remember it marking some few random blocks as "bad", and then later after reformatting the drive they seemed to have been repaired by the reformat. My explanation at the time was that reformatting applied some magnetic field onto the disks which brought things back into order. What actually is a "bad" block? Is it possible to "repair" it with such a savvy reformatting utility?
My 10 month old Western Digital drive has 3 contiguous bad blocks. They are deep enough inside the root partition that they will probably not cause any trouble for a while. Can I find a magical tool that will instruct the drive to fix them? Or should I just wrap a partition around them, and call it the partition of death. On Thu, 25 Sep 2003, Matthew J. Probst wrote: > I would agree with Stuart and Evan. All modern IDE drives have what SCSI > drives have had from the onset: bad block remapping. They have a pool of > X spare blocks that are not directly usable by the OS. When they read a > block and discover a read error (such as parity) they will take a block > from their spare pool and map it over the actual block. (It attempts to > copy the old data to the new block). Subsequent reads and writes will go > to the new block. > > With that being said, if the OS actually sees a bad block, this is > generally representative of the spare block pool being completely used up > (due to some many bad blocks). It can also be due to head problems or > parity checking problems. Either way, it means the drive is close to the > end of its life. > > Given the bad block remapping, most modern file systems have come to > expect a virtually 100% error free drive and generally don't know how to > deal with actually seeing bad blocks. Some deal better, though. Ext2/3 > have better bad block handling than FreeBSD's UFS (which can't deal with > bad blocks at all). > > -matt > > On Wed, 24 Sep 2003, Stuart Jansen wrote: > > > On Wed, 2003-09-24 at 21:01, Jeremy S Robertson wrote: > > > I'm now trying a new installation of redhat on my desktop. However, the > > > installation detected bad blocks and aborted the installation. > > > > > > What should I do to mark the bad blocks so I can install? > > > > My personal opinion (experience) is that bad blocks are a sign it's time > > to get a new drive. :-( > > > > If you're really insistent, you could format the drive by hand. I won't > > say more than > > > > mke2fs -c > > > > As you're taking the responsibility for your actions, a little reading > > of man pages is in order. > > > > -- > > Stuart Jansen <[EMAIL PROTECTED], AIM:StuartMJansen> > > > > #define FALSE 0 /* This is the naked Truth */ > > #define TRUE 1 /* and this is the Light */ -- mailto.c > > > > _______________________________________________ > newbies mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://phantom.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/newbies > _______________________________________________ newbies mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://phantom.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/newbies
