Re: re-using a damaged disk
On Thu, Jan 10, 2008 at 04:33:54AM +0100, Ivan Savcic wrote:
> On Jan 7, 2008 5:15 PM, Douglas A. Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca> wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Do all drives have it? I am pretty sure I got a contiguous part of bad
> blocks on all drives that failed me so far.
Well, I'm not sure when that feature was added to drives, so no not
_all_ drives ever. However, anything with S.M.A.R.T. certainly would,
and I would expect any drive over 1 GB to as well.
If you ever actually _see_ bad blocks on a newer drive, that means that
the drive has run out of spare blocks that it can remap. This means
that the drive is toast. The big thing that a badblocks check does is
it causes the drive to do a read/write attempt on every block. If there
are badblocks and the drive remaps it, you won't see them. If it
doesn't remap it, you may end up with a clean filesystem that you can
retreive your data off.
Doug.
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