Disk got a bad block; what now?

[Net Llama!]

That's hardly always the case.  Some drives go to hell quickly, others 
just have minor defects and are usable for years.

I've got an ancient 256MB IBM IDE drive that has had a grand total of 4 
bad blocks for the past 5 years, and never increased.

I've also seen a few drives that literally filled up with them in the 
span of a few days.

If you've got your data backed up, and don't mind having to reload the 
box in the event of a disk failure, then i'd keep it in service and 
monitor it to see if the number of bad blocks increases.

Lee wrote:
> 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?


-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
L. Friedman                       	       netllama at linux-sxs.org
Linux Step-by-step & TyGeMo: 		    http://netllama.ipfox.com

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