[plug] Bad Sectors...

[Jon Miller]

I remember reading somewhere that you need to keep the drives cool (or at least at a certain temperature) to prevent the drive from creating the bad sectors.  I can't remember exactly (getting too old :-)  ); but it was when I was looking for some information on fans.  I tend to now put a good fan in front of the drive so the air can pass over them and get sucked out by either another fan or the PSU fan.

JLM

Jon L. Miller, MCNE, CNS
Director/Sr Systems Consultant
MMT Networks Pty Ltd
http://www.mmtnetworks.com.au

"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure
 is trying to please everybody." -Bill Cosby



>>> T.Phillips at murdoch.edu.au 12:40:11 PM 2/02/2003 >>>
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?

-- 
. Trevor Phillips             -           http://jurai.murdoch.edu.au/ .
: Web Technical Administrator     -          T.Phillips at murdoch.edu.au :
| IT Services                        -              Murdoch University |
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