[plug] Working around bad blocks

[Carl Gherardi]

On 12/23/06, Timothy White <weirdit at gmail.com> wrote:
> $badblocks /dev/sda
> 3195200
> 3195201
> 3195202
> 3195203
>
> >From that, I've worked out that (from the man page default block size
> is 1024 bytes), that it's roughly at the 3120Mb point of the drive.
> So what I would do, is make a /tmp and swap in the first 3000Mb's of
> the drive, then a special blank 40Mb partition that would certainly
> cover the bad blocks, then use the rest of the drive for what I want
> to use it for, Debian mirrors.

If you are using ext2/ext3 you shouldn't need to do anything like this.

If you format the disk before install then run e2fsck -c immediately
after it should prevent any writing to the affected areas. Running
this regularly should keep you going for non critical stuff.

Caveat emptor - i've never tried to keep a disk running after it
started showing bad blocks.

Carl G