Disk got a bad block; what now?

[Lee]

Suggest you dump it. Once they start to go bad they just keep peeling 
and losing data, then the ability to boot.

Kevin O'Gorman wrote:

>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
>
>
>