Re: re-using a damaged disk
On Mon, Jan 07, 2008 at 03:58:47PM +0100, Ivan Savcic wrote:
> On Jan 7, 2008 3:37 PM, Douglas A. Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca> wrote:
>
> > Even if the filesystem type didn't need to be fsck'ed, for a damaged
> > drive I wanted to try to reuse, I wouldn't put real data on it until I
> > had exercised it for 24 hrs straight anyway.
>
> I agree, stress it as much as you can, ie. create partitions before
> and after the damaged part of the drive, create a 512 MB file from
> random data, then fill up the drive with that file (do the copying of
> the file in parallel). Then, again in parallel, do md5 sums of those
> files. Doing copying in parallel and then md5 summing in parallel will
> stress the drive with seeking. If it completes successfully, I think
> this drive would be "ok" to use for a year or so if you're lucky.
>
With bad-block remapping, you don't really know where the "damaged part
of the drive" is. I would go with one whole partition and if after
fsck -c -c there were still errors showing up in syslog, I'd ditch the
drive (after sanitizing it). The fsck -c -c should make a manual md5
check redundant.
You can also use wipe as a simple command line that will overwrite the
drive's surface many times as a way of giving the drive a bit of a
workout. It doesn't do random seeks though.
Doug.
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