[plug] Bad sectors on IDE disk

[Derek Fountain]

> Four letters: R A I...er... ;)

In a laptop? :o)

I could partition the disk and make an array of it, but that's expensive in 
terms of disk space. Even basic striping would halve the diskspace, which 
seems a rather high price to pay for a few bad sectors. Better than nothing, 
but I was hoping for something a bit less drastic.

> UNIX filesystems usually have at least a 'bad blocks inode'. Are you
> going to reformat the drive or do you want to continue using your
> current files? Perhaps have a look at the man pages for your current
> filesystem to find out how to add blocks to the bad block inode.

Reformatting is fine. I got the data off it when it started to go wonky.

I checked on how ReiserFS handles bad blocks, and basically it doesn't. There 
are some low level hacks which can be forced which might do the job, but it 
looked really horrible and error prone.

Perhaps that's a better way to phrase my question. Do advanced filesystems 
like XFS or ext3 have tools which allow you to manipulate bad blocks?

-- 
> eatapple
core dump