Re: OT: IDE/Bad Blocks: Call for mental assistance
martin f krafft wrote:
> problems), got the machine back into a running state, then ran
> `badblocks -svw` on the disk. And usually, I'd see a number of bad
> blocks, usually in excess of 100.
Modern IDE and SCSI drives fix the bad blocks using
the on chip microprocessor and give you a prefect drive.
There maybe some way to turn this off, but in general
you should never see bad blocks.
> The other day, I received a replacement drive from Hitachi, plugged
> it into a test machine, ran badblocks and verified that there were
> no badblocks. I then put the machine into a firewall, sync'd the
> data (ext3 filesystems) and was ready to let the computers be and
> head off to the lake... when the new firewall kept reporting bad
> reloc headers in libraries, APT would stop working, there would be
> random single-letter flips in /var/lib/dpkg/available (e.g. swig's
> Version field would be labelled "Verrion"), and the system kept
> reporting segfaults. I consequently plugged the drive into another
> test machine and ran badblocks -- and it found more than 2000 -- on
> a drive that had non the day before.
It could be a bad controller on the motherboard and
it sounds like it. You may be damaging hard drives with
a bad mootherboard.
> My understanding was that EIDE does automatic bad sector remapping,
> and if badblocks actually finds a bad block, then the drive is
> declared dead. Is this not the case?
Either a bad drive or bad cable or bad motherboard.
> And when
> I look around, there are thousands of consumer machines that run
> day-in-day-out without problems.
My disks seem to last for years, unless they
are in drive pulling cases and overheat.
> I don't think it's my IDE
> controller, since there are 5 different machines involved, and the
> chance that all IDE controllers report bad blocks where there aren't
> any, but otherwise function fine with respect to detecting the
> drives (and not reporting the dreaded dma:intr errors).
Does badblocks write the list of badblocks to the
hard disk so that it remembers badblocks from run to
run and when you moved the hard drive?
I used to design disk drive electronics for a living at Quantum.
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