On Thu, Jan 02, 2003 at 12:11:36PM -0800, Jesse Keating wrote: > On Thu, 2 Jan 2003 14:06:39 -0600 > Ed Wilts <ewilts@ewilts.org> wrote: > > > Secondly, you don't really want to mark out bad blocks, you want to > > replace the drive. I have yet to see a drive that has lasted for any > > period of time with bad blocks marked - all have been indicative of a > > pending hard failure, and I've been mananging systems for 20+ years. > > This is pretty misleading, since every harddisk made comes from the > factory w/ bad blocks. Yes, if you start seeing more bad blocks show > up, you've got problems, but the the very fact that bad blocks exist > doesn't mean that your disk is bad. Given the experience level of the poster, the very fact that he's *seeing* bad blocks means that he's seeing bad blocks that have appeared since the drive was certified at the factory. I remember when disks actually came from the factory certified error-free and *any* bad blocks rendered the platters bad. Later on, manufacturers started shipping disks with a piece of paper listing all the known bad blocks. We then saw disks that allocated some spare blocks and automatically revectored bad blocks to a spare block so that all disks always looked contiguously perfect. Today, if you're seeing bad blocks, that means that new blocks have appeared since it was shipped from the factory. If you can actually see the factory bad blocks, then you're likely smart enough to know how to deal with them. What the original poster saw was new bad blocks, and I stand by my comment that he's only delaying the failure of his drive (and it could by days or weeks). If he reintializes his file system later and forgets to rerun the badblocks utility, he'll very likely lose data. -- Ed Wilts, Mounds View, MN, USA mailto:ewilts@ewilts.org Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program -- Psyche-list mailing list Psyche-list@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/psyche-list
