-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 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). 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. Simply having some bad blocks is not enough reason to throw away a disk. Just force a write on those two bad sectors. - -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76 iD8DBQFDbsIptTMYHG2NR9URAg5/AJ9WagQhiBLnEmIRbTlOS+Zof4fSzgCgl4Qt +cMerLZkeAQk1ijmE++xz+M= =RbXD -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----