how to cope with bad blocks (and off-topic: WD warranty policy)

[Marcus Brinkmann <Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de>]

Hi,

I have now some bad blocks on my 2-year-old WD Caviar IDE drive. I'm not
overly concerned, because I have a brand new SeaGate, on where I install
hamm atm, but I wonder if linux can mark bad blacks as 'used', so that it
doesn't write on them anymore. Or how do you cope with bad blocks?
(I also get irq timeouts and drive resets, and then the system hangs. Why?)

The drive has a three year warranty. Will WD fix the drive or sent me a new
one because of bad blocks? Has anyone has experience with WD warranty?
Should I try to make heavy use of the drive to detect more (soon to be) bad
blocks, as long as I have warranty?

Thank you for your help,
Marcus

-- 
"Rhubarb is no Egyptian god."        Debian GNU/Linux        finger brinkmd@ 
Marcus Brinkmann                   http://www.debian.org    master.debian.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de                        for public  PGP Key
http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/Marcus.Brinkmann/       PGP Key ID 36E7CD09


--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org