[lug] Bad Sectors

[David Stearns]

If the data is worth it to you I'd recommend Spinrite from grc.com, I've had
REALLY good luck with recovering disks with all sorts of problems.  It is a
bit expensive, but if the data's worth it...
-DS

On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 3:02 PM, Zan Lynx <zlynx at acm.org> wrote:

> Gordon Golding wrote:
> >   I have a disk drive (used for data)  that started giving "messages".
> >
> > It happened right after the system drive filled up and crashed.
> >
> > SMART test says:
> >
> > Powered on 978 days
> > Current Pending Sector Count   10 sectors   FAILING  Old-age
> > Uncorrectable Sector Count        7 sectors   N/A         Old-age
> >
> > Questions:
> > 1)  Could the fact the the system drive crashed in the middle of a BIG
> > tar on this drive have something to do with it?
> > Should I try anything before believing this?
> >
> > 2)  This is a WD 320 - I thought these drives had big bad sector tables.
> > Is it time to just junk this unit?
>
> It appears to be about three years old. That is about the right age for
> common drive failures.
>
> However, if by "crash" you meant that the power went out, or someone
> reset the power to recover the system, the drive could have failed to
> write the sectors and is detecting them as "bad", but those bad sectors
> could be remapped by rewriting them.
>
> I think the bad block test program in read/write/read non-destructive
> write mode can do it, or if you want to take a risk you can try using
> "dd" on the block device to write zeros to the bad sectors if you know
> where they are and know how to do the math to convert the dmesg sector
> logs to dd byte/block offsets.
>
> --
> Zan Lynx
> zlynx at acm.org
>
> "Knowledge is Power.  Power Corrupts.  Study Hard.  Be Evil."
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