Re: How to handle the bad sectors on the hard disk?

On Wed, 30 May 2007 09:21:43 -0400, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:

> On Wed, May 30, 2007 at 07:08:25AM -0600, Ninenineone Efx wrote:
>> Programs freeze sometimes complaining i/o error, access failure on
>> specific sectors.
>> My hard disk begins to have bad sectors. It's 10-year old computer.
>>
>> Is there any tools that make user/kernel programs stop writing data on
>> bad sectors?
>>
>> I feel like I gonna need a new system soon.
>
> I think that it has been more than 10 years since hard drives started
> automatically mapping bad blocks to spare blocks; when they start
> showing bad blocks they've run out of spares. Its probably time to find
> a new hard drive.

In my experience, once a drive starts having bad blocks, it can get significantly worst startlingly fast. This is especially true with the internal error detection/recovery modern drives have -- once they report bad blocks, all their internal measures have failed.

Some friends
have suggested to me that if the bad blocks are caused by physical damage to the recording surface, fragments scraped off it may be wandering about the drive, landing elsewhere, and causing new bad blocks -- this bad blocks may even be contagious within the drive).

Make a complete backup while you still can (without destroying your previous backup -- the new one may be based on defective data) and replace the drive pronto.

• hendrik

>
> That said, yes you can keep the filesystem from writing on bad blocks by
> running a fsck on the filesysem while its unmounted, and select the
> appropriate badblocks option. Use the -f option to force a check even
> though the filesystem is marked as clean.
>
> For e2fsck its -c -c (to use a non-distructive read-write test)
>
> Not all filesystems support badblocks (e.g. JFS) but rely on the hard
> drive to handle them transparently (see above).
>
> The hard drive and the computer are only related by a cable and some
> screws. If the computer does everything you need and is reliable, it
> may only need a new hard drive.
>
> Doug.

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