Hello, On Tue, 17 Apr 2007 22:27:36 -0500 "Rajko M." <rmatov101@charter.net> wrote:
On Tuesday 17 April 2007 04:15, Clayton wrote: ...
I'm assuming the drive is unrecoverable (ie it's not worth risking my data to try and run the Maxtor tools on it and "repair" the drive)... so it's up for replacement in the next week or so.
You may try to slow down the drive. I got one that was about to fail, but decreasing the speed, using Maxtor utilities, from 66 to 33 helped and it still runs.
Probably, the decreasing speed problem is because the HDD controller changed a bad sector into a spare sector. and the spare sector possibility don't optimize to seek, I guess. AFAIK, A modern HDD has a number of spare sectors. and when happened a bad sector, that can replace a bad sector into a spare sector by using the hard drive tools, etc. *But*, there is a limitation in the number of spare sectors (and depend on HDD). For example, the following results by a smartctl on my HDD. # smartctl -A /dev/hda | egrep -e 'ATTRIBUTE_NAME|Reallocated_Sector_Ct' ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 005 Pre-fail Always - 2 The HDD used two spare sectors because the HDD had two bad sectors. And if the raw_value exceed the threshold, then it is necessary to change it with a new HDD, I think. So, there is a one way to defend the data from the bad sector. It is a RAID (Excluding RAID0). I would recommend the Linux Software RAID. In addition, you would want to read the following documents. http://help.com/wiki/Bad_sector http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/BadBlockHowTo.txt Thanks, eshsf -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org