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Re: HD Patch for badsectors?



begin  Louie Miranda <lmiranda@gmail.com> dedi ki:

> I have a really big problem.
> 
> I have a remote server, and some sectors on that drive is not
> functioning well. it has badsectors..

You need to change that (read "dead") disk at once, I think. Because,
modern IDE disks have spare sectors, sophisticated ECC recovery, and
transparent and automatic spare sector substitution. When number of
recoverable errors exceed a factory specified limit, that sector is copied
to a spare sector and marked as unusable. All automatic and transparent to
OS. Actually not so transparent if you happen to use smartd. SMART capable
disks keep counters on various events and resources, and feedback to OS
(through smartd) whenever a change occurs. You can also query and view all
the counters with a console command.

When a media error cannot be handled transparently by internal mechanisms
of IDE, that probably means all the spare sectors are already spent, so no
spare sector could be allocated while there is still time to recover a
sector via ECC, and finally that sector got so bad that ECC cannot help it.

Translation: You have a dead disk.

> end_request: I/O error, dev 03:03 (hda), sector 7372776
>
> What commands, can i type? to patch everything and just make it active
> so i could re-do my backup. common commands like ls, cp, mv, scp, tar
> are not working.
>
> common errors are.. "Bus error" and "input/output" errors.

I don't think you can alleviate it by just remotely typing a magic
command. I would:

1. Install a second, new disk together with the bad one.
2. Create the same partition layout on the new disk.
3. Leaving the partition that has the bad sector alone, copy all the other
partitions to the new disk (via dd or cpio).
4. For the "bad" partition, first dd from start of the partition to the
bad sector with dd command, then skipping the bad sector, copy from the
next sector to the end of partition with a second dd command.
5. Swap the bad disk with the new one and pray that the bad sector didn't
have something vital.
6. Install smartd and smartmon to keep an eye on my disks.

HTH
-- 
Abdullah        | aramazan@ |
Ramazanoglu     | myrealbox |
________________| D.0.T cöm |__



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