[ale] checking disk sectors

Gary Maltzen maltzen at mm.com
Thu Aug 3 17:38:52 EDT 2000


> Some of my hard drives are getting pretty old, so I've been
> running e2fsck -c on them, and also e2defrag.  I don't have
> anything important on those partitions, but I do mount them.  And
> every now and then, my system appear to freeze while the
> filesystem goes on a hunt for some missing block or something
> that appears to have gone missing.

e2defrag??? when did that appear???

> Can you actually repair the physical surfaces of hard drives with
> Linux or any tools?  Do you just mark the bad sectors and stay
> away from them?

With the current crop of drives you just mark the bad sectors and move on.
If you are getting a lot of hits, you should consider that a warning of
impending drive failure. IMO, it's sort of an issue of how much time you
really want to spend recovering that data...

Reformatting the physical tracks is generally manufacturer-specific. Perhaps
Gibson's current incarnation of SPINRITE is capable.

> Do you just throw away the old hard drives, even though only some
> of the surface area is shot?
>
> I guess big drives are cheap nowadays, but I'm kinda cheap too,
> and I also hate to throw away a HD that might be useful somehow.

Does this mean you're interested in that 1"-high 15MB IDE drive that's been
sitting on my shelf since the early 90's?


(I *am* using a 220MB in my ipchains router, ISDN PPP auto-dialer)

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