I have seen a couple of your posts on this and thought I'd chime in since I know a bit about storage. I frequently see io errors come through to user space (both read and write requests) from usb flash drives, so there is a functioning error path there to some degree. When I see the errors, the kernel is also logging the sector and eventually resetting the device. There is no doubt a disk drive will slow down when it hits a bad spot since it will retry numerous times, most likely trying to remap bad blocks. Of course your write succeeded because you probably have the drive cache enabled. Flush or a full cache hangs while the drive retries all of the sectors that are bad, remapping them until finally it can remap no more. At some point it probably returns an error if flush is timing out or it can't remap any more sectors, but it won't include the bad sector. I would suggest turning the drive cache off. Then the drive won't lie to you about completing writes and you'll at least know which sectors are bad. Just a thought :-) - Mike -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxx For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>