Bad allocation unit on hard drive

On Fri, 11 Aug 2006 23:27:09 GMT, Jim staggered into the Black Sun and said:

Modern IDE disks have transparent bad-sector remapping. If you start seeing bad sectors, the disk has run out of spare sectors. The number of bad sectors will typically grow and keep growing until the disk's unusable. But don't take my word for it, see what "smartctl -adev-hda" says. My guess is that at least one of the numbers returned will be in "prefailure" range, which means it's time for a new disk.

New 20G 2.5" disk: $60, roughly, according to pricewatch. It's probably worth it, as then you'd know it'd work without problems for 2-3 years. (Unless this HPCompaq has a drive-replacement procedure akin to some iBooks, which requires disbuttembling practically everything.)

There are manufacturer-specific commands that might do this, but who knows whether a particular manufacturer has made them do something useful for model N of drive M? I thought that "low-level formatting" died in the early 1990s, when controller cards and disks started to be sold as single units. This has a low probability of working AFAICT. You can try it, but I think you'll probably just waste time.

-- Matt GThere is no Darkness in Eternity-But only Light too dim for us to see Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong ----------------------------- penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL