Disk got a bad block; what now?

[Jim Conner]

As was suggested by another e-mail, the problem will just get worse, not 
better.  But if you want to mark bad blocks use the following commands.

badblocks -o <bad_blocks_file>
fsck -l <bad_blocks_file>

The best bet is to look at the file generated and see how many bad blocks 
there actually are.  If you do this, I wouldn't use that partition for any 
mission critical stuff due to reliability.

Jim

On Friday, May 24, 2002 6:42, 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

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