If you get a bad sector on a disk you can't get the data back. If you rewrite that data then the disk can put data back. It may use the same space on the medium or place the sector somewhere else on the physical platter depending on the error involved. Alan - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html