[rescue] Bad Sectors

[Curtis H. Wilbar Jr.]

Aaron Finley wrote:
> On 1/19/07, Nick B. <nick at pelagiris.org> wrote:
>   
>> If you're seeing bad sectors on a modern IDE hard drive it's junk.  All modern
>> drives have a set of spare sectors to replace sectors as they go bad, and once
>> that list has filled up you're at the other end of the bathtub.
>>         Nick
>>     
>
> I've gone through about five drives now. The first one was a 250GB
> which had about 100 bad sectors, so I salvaged the magnets and kept
> the controller board.
>
> The rest have been 200s, and three have been bad sector free. I am
> using a disk inspection program that writes zeros to every single bit,
> and one drive had one bad sector. I am unsure, as per your advice,
> whether I should trash the drive for one bad sector. I will run
> seatools on that drive and see how it turns out.
>   

No one seems (so far) to have mentioned S.M.A.R.T.

(I use the smart tools in linux)

with S.M.A.R.T, you can get a dump of info regarding bad blocks, and other
error counts to get an idea of the status of a drive that even looks perfect
(but might be starting on the road to failure and simply not show visible
signs yet).

Even on the drives that test bad block free... I'd see if you can get a look
at the SMART data.... make sure errors aren't creeping up....

And as to the warranty thing someone mentioned... I've done similar... 
having
been given dead product (from work or individuals) that upon running the
serial number through the vendor turns up under warranty....

I obtained new (remanufactured mostly) 500 meg and 1G scsi drives, a few
2G and 4G SCSI drives, a 9 or two, an 18G SCSI drive, a couple of IDE 
drives,
and a 2.4Ghz P4 Prescott processor this way. 

At one time it was easy with drives... each manufacturer had 1 warranty 
length
for each type of drive they sold (example 5 yrs for SCSI, 2 or 3 yrs for IDE
was common)... but now in the last few years you have 1,2,3,4,or 5 years on
IDE, and with WD (and others?) you could extend you warranty too... (I did
so on a few because I got the drives for free, and the warranty was near 
running
out and I think it was $15 a drive).

-- Curt

> -- Aaron
> _______________________________________________
> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue