[mythtv-users] OT: XFS and damaged sectors

Robin Hill myth at robinhill.me.uk
Sun Feb 18 11:26:11 UTC 2007


On Fri Feb 16, 2007 at 03:44:12PM -0800, David Brodbeck wrote:

> Cristo Bolaņos wrote:
> > Hello :)
> >
> > I've a 250 GB hardisk with a xfs filesystem holding video and music,
> > but it has damaged sectors :/
> >
> > I know there isn't way to recover data in damaged zones, at least in
> > an easy way, but... is it possible to format again the hard disk and
> > continue using it ?
> >   
> 
> I'm sure you could reformat it and start over, but why?  If a drive is
> showing bad sectors, it means it's probably about to fail.  You'd be
> better off replacing the drive.
> 
> Modern hard disks have some spare tracks they use to silently replace
> bad sectors in the main, usable part of the disk.  (This is why they
> don't come with "defect lists" like the old XT hard drives did.)  If
> you're actually seeing bad sectors it means there have already been so
> many that the disk has run out of spares.
>
Not necessarily - bad sectors are only remapped on write failures, not
on read failures.  I've had disks (in an array) with repeated read
errors.  Taking the disk out of the array and writing zeros across the
entire disk (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda) has forced the bad sector
remapping and I've been able to re-add it into the array without any
further errors.  The SMART info on the drive should also tell you the
number of remapped blocks (using smartctl - part of smartmontools).

Cheers,
        Robin
-- 
     ___        
    ( ' }     |       Robin Hill        <myth at robinhill.me.uk>  |
   / / )      | Little Jim says ....                            |
  // !!       |      "He fallen in de water !!"                 |
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