the box locks up !

[Fraser Campbell]

On February 3, 2004 07:23 pm, David J Patrick wrote:

>     can't I just run scandisk .. oh drat, blast and tarnation ! !
> or _maybe_ you are just saying that, and it's a data error, or bad
> sector that can be isolated

Not likely to be worth the trouble but do confirm that the drive is bad.  If 
you have a spare computer around that you can put the drive in do so, format 
it there with badblock checking (perhaps using a knoppix rescue disk).  By 
moving it to a second computer you lessen the probability of ide controllers, 
memory or other things that might be screwing with you.  Change the IDE 
ribbon as well when doing the reformat test.

You could format it like this, be prepared to wait a very long time:

  mke2fs -c -c /dev/hdb

Alternatively there's the badblocks program, never used it personally.
-- 
Fraser Campbell <fraser-Txk5XLRqZ6CsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org>                 http://www.wehave.net/
Georgetown, Ontario, Canada                               Debian GNU/Linux
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