On Sun, 20 Aug 2000, Tom Rauschenbach wrote:
> I've got a disk with some bad spots.
Throw it out. Seriously.
Any hard disk made within the past fifteen years or so has space reserved
for the remapping of bad sectors, plus built-in logic to handle that
remapping. If you are actually getting errors at the OS level, it means the
disk is so far gone its built-in error correction capabilities have become
overwhelmed. The whole disk is probably going to die pretty soon. With hard
disks being so cheap (you can get multi-gig drives for under $100), trying to
squeeze an extra six months out of a failing drive just isn't worth it.
(And if it is a floppy disk, well, the average price of a floppy disk has
fallen to about free, so again, it isn't worth the effort.)
> fsck and mkfs don't seem to find them.
Most "mkfs" utilities support a "-c" argument, which will check the disk for
bad blocks as it creates the filesystem. I say "most" because "mkfs" is
actually just a front-end for programs like mke2fs, mkdosfs, etc., and the
actual implementation of "-c" is up to those programs. If the filesystem you
are using doesn't support "-c", try the "badblocks" command.
> Does anyone know how to say "format" to linux ? I want to wip this thing
> clean and unmap all the bad spots.
If you are looking to do a low-level format, the answer depends on the drive
type.
For floppies, the command is "fdformat", which should be included in most
Linux distros. (This, incidentally, is the only kind of low-level format the
DOS "FORMAT.COM" command will do.)
For SCSI drives, you need a utility called "scsifmt", which can be found
somewhere on Sunsite (now MetaLab) IIRC. Alternatively, many SCSI host
adapter BIOSes have a format utility built-in. Just be warned that a
low-level format of a modern hard disk can take several hours.
For IDE drives, the method of performing a low-level format appears to be
manufacture-specific. Some drive OEMs provide a low-level command on their
website, but it tends to be DOS only.
Hope this helps,
--
Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
| "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too |
| dark to read!" -- Groucho Marx |
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