[plug] Working around bad blocks

[Arie Hol]

On 23 Dec 2006 at 19:53, Timothy White wrote:

> Ok, I have a HDD that I know has 4 bad blocks on it, and no more. The
> reason for them was a heat problem in a previous machine. I won't be
> storing critical data on the drive, but would still like to use it.
> $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.
> 
> Does this sound right to everyone? (i.e. my maths?)
> 

Sounds alright to me - but I would be inclined to "NOT" partition the 
area of the drive which contains the Bad Blocks ie - leave that area 
unpartitioned.

I say this because - if you ever use a partition checking utility - it 
may trip up on the Bad Blocks.

I say this because I recently had a problem on a dual boot machine, where 
there was an error in the partition table (thanks to Win XP) I tried to 
use Partition Magic to fix it - when it started up it reported that it 
had found an error in the partition table and that it could repair the 
error.

I clicked on OK and all was good - until I rebooted the PC to use Linux - 
there was a problem - grub could not find any Linux partitions because 
they were "Gone".

Your problem is not related to my problem - but I would leave the Bad 
Blocks on an unused portion of the drive - just in case...........

Regards Arie
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