To get a definitive answer to whether the drive is actually remapping defects due to bad blocks you have to examine the "defect lists". It's easy to do on SCSI, I expected libata to swizzle the cmd into ATA'ez but it apparently fails on my dell.
sg_reassign --grow /dev/sda I don't know how to do it in ATA off the top of my head but I could find out. It's likely accessible only through some SMART log page. I agree with the assertion mentioned here: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.utilities.smartmontools/5252 The reason being the drive firmware will remap to another block on write should there be an error. Smart may be trying to be "too smart" by observing the block re-allocation and coming to the conclusion that this is possible iif a write error occured. Here's a decent defintion of how defect tracking works: http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/hard-drive-defects-table.htm -- palimpsest bad sectors false positive https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/438136 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs