On 09-08-08 11:54:37, Bill Davidsen wrote: ... > I'm not sure what you expect low level formatting to do for you, > backing up and writing and reading to every sector will force all > current bad blocks to be found, One thing is that each of those blocks requires a long seek to the replacement block. After the drive manufacturer's low-level format, all the blocks are in order, with only short skips past the bad blocks, and possibly a slight reduction in the size of the spare blocks area. > but honestly "has developed many bad blocks" is another way of saying > "is failing" and is a hint to replace now. When a drive starts > relocating sectors (as seen in SMART), something is wrong with the > drive. ... ... Modern drives (last 8 or so years) have good support for automatic remapping of bad blocks, because bad blocks are expected at the magnetic domain sizes being used. With Automatic Offline Testing enabled, most bad blocks are remapped before complete failure and without data loss. I've been using one "dying" drive for 7 more years now (with one low- level format), and another for about 4 more years. I'm using a drive I found in a snowbank, without difficulty and without bad sectors. I have SMART monitoring enabled, so email will be sent to root if SMART gets unhappy, and Auto Offline Data Collection enabled, so blocks are being salvaged as they go bad. I'm /not/ using that panicky Palimpsest (gnome-disk-utility applet), so I don't get spurious warnings (moderate numbers of reallocated sectors are not bad -- though offline- uncorrectable and pending sectors are bad). -- ____________________________________________________________________ TonyN.:' <mailto:tonynelson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> ' <http://www.georgeanelson.com/> -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
