Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (6210 mails)

[Doug McGarrett <dmcgarrett@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 11:17 PM 10/6/2005 -0400, James Knott wrote:
>
>James Wright wrote:
>
>> Anyways, what can I do to find out if I have a physical problem with my
>> drive, and if I do, can I mark a section of the hard drive as 'bad' so
>> that it will not be used?  I can't afford a new hard drive, and
>> desperately need this laptop as it is my only computer.  Thank you for
>> any help or suggestions.
>
>I don't know about marking a section bad, but you can alway create a
>partition containing the bad area and just not use it.
>
>-- 

I would have to tell you that XP has been a very solid OS, even if you 
don't trust MS--as I don't either.  There are programs--most of which 
run on some version of DOS or Windows--which will attempt to find bad 
sectors, etc. on a drive and mark them.  Some of these may run from a 
floppy, and they may be available free--or maybe not.  Try and Google 
for something that will find bad sectors.  Then it may mark them, and
protect from trying to format and use them.  I'm not sure how this kind
of thing works, but it was common 15 years ago, or so, when there were
bad sectors frequently found on disks.  I don't know if this technology 
will work for an NTFS file system, or whatever MS uses to format a drive.
(It's _not_ fdisk anymore.)  I would be unhappy with a drive that had
bad sectors in this modern age.  I wouldn't trust it.  Hard drives
are not that expensive nowadays, even the ones that go in laptops.
If I am in error here, please correct me.

--doug


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