On Fri, Aug 18, 2006 at 09:19:04AM -0500, Kirk Strauser wrote: > On Thursday 17 August 2006 8:35 am, Antony Mawer wrote: > > > A quick question - is it recommended to initialise disks before using > > them to allow the disks to map out any "bad spots" early on? > > Note: if you once you actually start seeing bad sectors, the drive is almost > dead. A drive can remap a pretty large number internally, but once that > pool is exhausted (and the number of errors is still growing > exponentially), there's not a lot of life left.
There are some exceptions to this. The drive can not remap a sector which failes to read. You must perform a write to cause the remap to occur. If you get a hard write failure it's gameover, but read failures aren't necessicary a sign the disk is hopeless. For example, the drive I've had in my laptop for most of the last year developed a three sector[0] error within a week or so of arrival. After dd'ing zeros over the problem sectors the problem sectors I've had no problems. -- Brooks [0] The error occured in one of the worst possible locations and fsck could not complete until I zeroed those locations. That really sucked.
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