On Sunday 06 November 2005 19:55, Carlos E. R. wrote:
The Sunday 2005-11-06 at 16:18 -0700, Carlos F Lange wrote:
PS: I forgot to mention that my original Seagate SATA still 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".
You could use SMART to check that reserved space ussage:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 036 Pre-fail Always - 0
or:
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 096 096 036 Pre-fail Always - 42
(except that, I understand, smartctl does not support SATA yet :-( )
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?
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? Carlos F.L. --