I'd like the thank the originator of this tip. I had a few drives reporting bad spots (in the full SMART report which you get only when you download the source and build it; and also when I tried to secure erase I got write errors *sometimes* w/ hangs, noted in apple console logs)
Yes, erasing at the drive level rather than the partition level, with secure erase, eliminated the errors. Of some concern to me of course if more bad spots turn up. Had one drive turn up no more for four years (formatted free space around the spot) and another got another in 6 months, or anyway the files ran into it -- all this before I even knew about secure erase at all... On Mar 20, 4:12 pm, Charles Davis <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mar 20, 2009, at 11:57 AM, Dan wrote: > > > > > At 9:38 AM -0400 3/20/2009, insightinmind wrote: > > snip > > > SMART is a *monitoring* mechanism, to alert (someone) when things > > start to go south. It has nothing to do with actual corrective > > measures, such as bad block replacements -- which are handled by the > > hardware controllers these days. > > >> I always thought (Re)Formatting a drive, zeroing out data, did the > >> bad sector mapping out, but only during the formatting process. > > > That's re-initializing a drive. You cannot reformat modern drives. well some you can if you have a machine that can boot 8.5.1, that was the last you were allowed by apple (actually that version of drive setup works in 8.1 too). I only did this once, and IIRC it only helped for a limited time. > > > The process of zeroing it -- writing zeros to each sector on the > > drive causes the hardware's bad block replacement mechanism to > > trigger as needed. > > What isn't being said here, is whether the 'bad block' mechanism is > operational when zeroing at the partition level, or only when the > complete hard disk is being 'zeroed'. > The latter is my experience. > Chuck D. > > > - Dan. > > -- > > - Psychoceramic Emeritus; South Jersey, USA, Earth --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed Low End Mac's G3-5 List, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list?hl=en Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
