On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 5:13 PM, Bruno Wolff III <bruno@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 08:36:48 -0700, > JD <jd1008@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> There is nothing you can do about >> relocated bad blocks. > > You can use secure erase. That is suppsed to try to do something with those. > You can also use encryption in the first place. > It will be some work to get from where the system is now to a state where > secure erase has been used and stuff is put back on top of an encrypted > block device, but it can be done. This is interesting - I recently had a machine that was reporting an HD that passed the health check, but there were palimpsest popups appearing warning of possible disc failure due to pending reallocated sector counts going up. It took me a week to get a replacement machine to slot in and when I got the dying machine out of service I used secure erase to kill the disc data after booting a live cd and running hdparm commands to issue the secure erase. At the end of the secure erase process, which appeared to end normally, I used a live CD to boot and use palimpsest to check the "now erased" hard drive in the original position in the processor box - the report still showed a non-zero pending sector count so I was not sure what the state of the data was - I had not done this before and usually simply open up the HD and remove the platters and drive head and then "deal" with the platters such that they would not be likely to be read again! However in this case I was interested to see what the disc state was (purely from an inquisitive viewpoint) after the secure erase process had completed (using HDparm commands) I was still unsure whether before physical destruction any data could have been retrieved from the drive? However hdparm -I /dev/sda showed an apparently clean disc with no partitions on it. -- mike c -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
