[plug] Bad Sectors...

[Bret Busby]

On Sun, 2 Feb 2003, Trevor Phillips wrote:

> 
> I have a HDD which on a Win98 PC had bad sectors, and caused various 
> problems. After investigation, I found online that this particular model 
> drive (A 40Gb Seagate) was famous for getting very hot, causing bad sectors.
> 
> I've now placed it in my Linux box, and Ext3'ed it, doing a -cc (ie; 
> over the top bad sector scan) when formatting it.
> 
> I've done some other tests throwing data on the drive, md5'ing it, etc, 
> and had no problems at all - so far!
> 
> I'd REALLY like to make use of this disk, since any extra disk space on 
> my budget is a welcome thing. So, a few questions on dealing with bad 
> sectors:
> 
> Should mke2fs report bad sectors found at the end? (As it didn't when I 
> formatted it...)
> 
> Is there any commands to list known bad sectors? Preferrably their 
> location as well, so I can tell if they're clumped together?
> 
> Does the S.M.A.R.T HDD setting in the PC BIOS have anything to do with 
> auto-correction of bad sectors? Since I've had no problems in my PCs, 
> but had problems in the other PC, I'm wondering if I can blame the other 
> PC's BIOS/main-board (a dodgy EliteGroup board) for the lack of error 
> correction...
> 
> If I have a problem of growing bad sectors (even if slowly), then would 
> the drive still be useable if I divided it in two and RAID 1'ed the 
> partitions?
> 
> Any other ideas?
> 
> 

Not a Linux solution, but, since you mentioned that it had problems, as 
a Win98 HDD...