On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 9:26 AM, nate <centos at linuxpowered.net> wrote: > Lorenzo Quatrini wrote: > Not sure myself but the manufacturer's testing tools have > non destructive ways of detecting and re-mapping bad sectors. > Of course a downside to the manufacturer's tools is they often > only support a limited number of disk controllers. > > It's probably been since the IBM Deathstar 75GXP that I last recall > having drives with bad sectors on them but typically at least at that > time, when the OS encountered a bad sector it didn't handle it too > gracefully, often times had to reboot the system. Perhaps the linux > kernel is more robust for those things these days (I had roughly 75% > of my 75GXP drives fail - more than 30). > > Interesting that the man page for e2fsck in RHEL 4 doesn't describe > the -c option, but the man page for it in RHEL 3 does, not sure if > that is significant(RHEL4 man page mentions the option, but no > clear description of what it does). Haven't checked RHEL/CentOS 5. > > from RHEL 3 manpage: > -c This option causes e2fsck to run the badblocks(8) > program to find any blocks which are bad on the > filesystem, and then marks them as bad by adding > them to the bad block inode. If this option > is specified twice, then the bad block scan will > be done using a non-destructive read-write test. > > So if you haven't heard of it already, try e2fsck -c <device> ? > I recall using this off and on about 10 years ago but found the > manufacturer's tools to be more accurate. > >> And yes, I know that a disk with bad blocks isn't reliable, but you >> remember? >> I'm too lazy to send my home disks back to the manufacturer ;) > > Ahh ok, I see...just keep in mind that it's quite possible the > bad sector count will continue to mount as time goes on.. There is a thread on this topic in the CentOS forum: http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=15880&forum=39 Akemi