It would be far better to use Spinrite (like I mentioned before) - to allow a really low level access to the drive. While Spinrite is running the HDD will not be able to automatically relocate sectors. I've been blown away how effective this piece of software is - even when run with (apparently) very knackered Maxtor drives!! It was like they were brought back from the dead...
On 25 January 2015 at 13:41, Mick <michaelkintz...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Saturday 24 Jan 2015 18:18:36 Dale wrote: > > > Since I already replaced this drive, nothing lost. We did learn > > something tho. Just because it claims to have fixed itself doesn't mean > > it will be a long term solution. ;-) > > > > Dale > > > > :-) :-) > > Your repeated dd action probably relocated some bad blocks. > > I would also run a long test overnight to see where and how it fails. I > recently had a drive which went sideways on me. Running dd was successful > in > relocating some problematic sectors. However, repeating the smart tests > revealed that more and more sectors were going bad. I recall a warning > that a > catastrophic drive failure was imminent, when reading the output of > 'smartctl > -a'. > > Instead of dd'ing the whole drive, just dd the suspect sector and repeat > the > smart tests to see how things move around. I concur with other posters > that > this drive should only be used for experimentation, rather than production > or > back ups. > > -- > Regards, > Mick > -- All the best, Robert
