Hello,

On Tue, 17 Apr 2007 22:27:36 -0500
"Rajko M." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> On Tuesday 17 April 2007 04:15, Clayton wrote:
> ...
> > I'm assuming the drive is unrecoverable (ie it's not worth risking my
> > data to try and run the Maxtor tools on it and "repair" the drive)...
> > so it's up for replacement in the next week or so.
> >
> 
> You may try to slow down the drive. 
> I got one that was about to fail, but decreasing the speed, using Maxtor 
> utilities, from 66 to 33 helped and it still runs. 

Probably, the decreasing speed problem is because the HDD controller
changed a bad sector into a spare sector. and the spare sector possibility
don't optimize to seek, I guess.

AFAIK, A modern HDD has a number of spare sectors. and when happened a bad
sector, that can replace a bad sector into a spare sector by using the hard
drive tools, etc.
*But*, there is a limitation in the number of spare sectors (and depend on HDD).

For example, the following results by a smartctl on my HDD.

# smartctl -A /dev/hda | egrep -e 'ATTRIBUTE_NAME|Reallocated_Sector_Ct'
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  
WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   005    Pre-fail  Always       
-       2

The HDD used two spare sectors because the HDD had two bad sectors.
And if the raw_value exceed the threshold, then it is necessary to change it
with a new HDD, I think.

So, there is a one way to defend the data from the bad sector.
It is a RAID (Excluding RAID0). I would recommend the Linux Software RAID.


In addition, you would want to read the following documents. 
  http://help.com/wiki/Bad_sector
  http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/BadBlockHowTo.txt


Thanks,
eshsf
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