On Thursday 08 April 2010 04:44:33 pm Paul E Condon wrote: > I want to use the low cost high capacity hard drives that are > for sale in places like Best Buy and Costco. I have put ext3 on > several of them and started experimenting. The results so far > are puzzling. > > I do get errors. So I decided to do scans for bad blocks. The drives > I'm using are all Western Digital because they have been the lowest > cost at the times I buy at Costco. Also all are 500GB. > > e2fsck -c <device> is supposed to scan for bad blocks and allocate them > to a special inode so that they cannot be used. It runs for 3 to 4 > hours and then says its finished with no indication of how many bad > blocks it found. > > dumpe2fs -b <device> is supposed to print the bad blocks that have > been marked on a device. When I run it, it prints nothing. I find it > hard to believe that a 500GB HD contains ZERO bad blocks. Especially > one on which I have witnessed error messages about I/O errors in > writing the journal. I can find no information about what, exactly, > dumpe2fs is supposed to print. The wording seems to be that it prints > the contents of the bad blocks. But in other places it seems that it > prints a list of block numbers, or maybe cylinder/sector/head. Since I > see nothing, I don't have a clue as to what I should see. > > Has anyone ever used these programs? Have you ever seen useful output? > What SHOULD they do (with a little more specificity and believability)? > > -- > Paul E Condon > pecon...@mesanetworks.net
I used 'smartmontools' AFAIKT, lots of drives have errors, errors get re-mapped by the hd firmware, some drives are more accurate than others. Never did get straight, but the drives keep working. smartmontools uses badblocks , if memory serves. -- Greg Madden Precision Air Balance, Inc. Phone: (907)276-0461 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/201004082141.26567.p...@gci.net
