-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Monday 2005-11-07 at 00:25 -0700, Carlos F Lange wrote:
boots fine, despite the couple of bad blocks.
Having badblocks in a HD is absolutely normal. In fact, it is practically impossible to have defect free hard disks. Therefore, they have a number of sectors reserved by the manufacturer for replacing bad blocks. When the disk tries to write on a bad block, it automatically writes the data on one of the reserved blocks, and from then on, every request for that sector is instead maped to the new one. This is done transparently to the OS, but it can be dissabled (hdparm).
I thought this was a sign that a hard disk was going bad. Actually resierfsck has a comment accompanying the bad block message saying something to the tune of "it is not worth risking your data with this hard disk".
Yes, it is a sign of age, but not always. My rule of thumb is to worry when the number of bad sectors continues increasing, and not if it stabilizes. For example, if I gave a hard blow with the hand on the table, and the HD complains of bad sectors, then I would change that HD _fast_. :-P
One of the three Seagate disks on this system developped bad blocks some years ago, and is still working, 10000 working hours later. Not a problem.
OK, this gives me a bit of comfort, but it still doesn't help me with the second SATA disk I purchased. Why is 9.3 hanging on that disk, when 9.1 has no problem with it? Anything else I can try to make it work?
I don't know. Who is giving that error message ("Searching for info file"), grub? I just searched the manual, but couldn't find it. But I think you mean it is a kernel message: it has a problem with iterrupt request #11, that went unhandled, then crashes. What kernel are you using, the last one? I had problems with "2.6.11.4-21.9" crashing, and had to revert to 2.6.11.4-21.8. My error was "kernel: hdb dma_timer_expiry: dma status= 0x64", and I'm not the only one having that problem with that particular kernel. Something they changed in the HD handling.
Simply having some bad blocks is not enough reason to throw away a disk. Just force a write on those two bad sectors.
I heard this before, but I have no idea how to write on those blocks. If I know block and sector numbers from reiserfsck, how can I direct a write command to those blocks?
With dd - I'm not sure of the exact command now, I'd have to dig the manual. Or overwrite the whole disk with zeros, to be on overkill^H^H..^Hsafe mode. O simply delete the files affected, and wait till the space gets overwritten... but I don't like that idea. Reiserfs is not happy handling bad blocks. Or was, I think they changed things in that respect. Older/traditional filesystems simply marked the sector as bad, and went on working. Reiserfs instead relied on the HD firmware remapping feature (also called "defect management feature"). But as I said, this has changed, although I haven't tested it. - -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76 iD8DBQFDb7intTMYHG2NR9URApLzAJ9slWjy6dsWYo18y6Hca5q423cB1gCeI2To O2z8LNC+Zwn199aLosU93N0= =054W -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----