Disk got a bad block; what now?

[Kevin O'Gorman]

It's been a very long time since this happened to me,
but my root partition seems to have come down with a case of
bad block in the inode table.  SCSI drive, too, though
a bit old (not sure, maybe 7 years; its 4GB).

Fsck indicates the files affected aren't too numerous or
critical, they are
   /root/.cpan/sources/authors
   /var/webmin/miniserv.pid
   /var/webmin/sessiondb.pag
   /var/webmin/sessiondb.dir

I can live without these, or rebuild them, or reload them.
Whatever.

I've used 'cp -a' to move my root partition to another drive,
and things are running happily.  Now I would like to reclaim
that partition.  Is there a recommended incantation for getting
that block into the bad blocks table without formatting the
whole bloody thing?  Should I just try writing on it and
hope it doesn't sin any more?  Should I worry about the
whole drive going bad?

++ kevin



-- 
Kevin O'Gorman  (805) 650-6274  mailto:kevin at kosmanor.com
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