[sllug-members]: fsck and bad sector list

[James Helsby]

Allen Parker wrote:
> On 12/12/06, James Helsby <cyanics at xmission.com> wrote:
>> In response:
>> The drive is about 6 months old. There were no physical problems with
>> it, nor were there any mechanical / magnetic problems.
>>
>> What happened, was just like I explained. When fsck saw bad data sectors
>> (not bad physical sectors) it wrote those sectors to the bad-block list.
>> The ending result was that I lost a shlew of data (corruptions) and the
>> sectors the data resided on.
>>
>> However, I am pleased that after 3 days I was able to figure it out. I
>> ended up using a program call HDAT2 in boot mode, to 1) error check the
>> physical disk. 2) wipe the physical disk. 3) move the last address (LBA)
>> down by 5. 4) move the LBA up by 5. 5) Wipe again
>>
>> The result, was that the 250 is back sane. Currently formating it with
>> helix, and will be putting it back into production in a few minutes.
>>
>> Saved.
>>
>> JH.
>>
>> Don Flemming wrote:
>> > My first suggestion is to run an anti virus scan off a safe boot
>> > disk.There are older binary virus's that specifically rewrite your bad
>> > sector table but I haven't heard of anyone encountering these in a few
>> > years. Then  ask yourself how old is the harddrive? Maxtors are
>> > somewhat known for sudden failures like that and typically after three
>> > years. fsck (filesystem check) appears to rebuild your bad sector
>> > table, it may simply have found your drive about to die. I look
>> > forward to what you find out.
>
> This is why we have smartmontools.
>
>> > Don
>> > */James Helsby <cyanics at xmission.com>/* wrote:
>> >
>> >     All,
>> >
>> >     I have a 250Gb HD, which was reporting file corruption. As a
>> >     result, I
>> >     ran an fsck.ext3 -f -y /dev/sdb1 (the device) on it, which
>> >     resulted in
>> >     me loosing 150 of the 250 GB of space. For some reason, the fsck
>> >     decided
>> >     that everything was bad-sector, and added it to the bad-sector 
>> list.
>> >
>> >     Here is the problem. I still need the drive. I know that there 
>> are no
>> >     physical problems with the disk, and it has since be physically
>> >     scanned
>> >     for magnetic defects, and low-level formatted. However, both of 
>> these
>> >     actions have not cleared the bad-sector list.
>> >
>> >     Anyone on the list know how to clear a bad-sector list? It is a
>> >     Maxtor
>> >     DiamondMax 10 (pata133). The system I run it on is Ubuntu 6.10.
>> >
>> >     Cheers
>> >     JH.
>> >
>> >
>
> Smart monitoring works, and has let me know about dying WD disks
> months in advance.
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smartmon was up and running. no warning.