How to replace a hard drive...

[Ori Idan]

On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 7:45 PM, Lennart Sorensen <
lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> On Wed, May 04, 2011 at 06:25:05PM -0400, Peter King wrote:
> > A little while ago I had a Western Digital Caviar Black drive that was
> throwing
> > bad sector errors. On the view that storage is cheap and reliability is
> crucial,
> > I replaced it with a fresh shiny new hard disk (a 1TB Seagate Barracuda),
> and one
> > way or another managed to restore all the data that was on the damaged
> disk.
> >
> > This left me with the WD disk. So I tried reformatting it, which should
> lock out the
> > bad sectors. That seems to work: once reformatted, it passes fsck with no
> problem,
> > and it has fast access times.
>
> fsck means nothing.  Use mkfs with badblock check.  Unless you low level
> formatted it, nothing is done about bad sectors.  Of course modern drives
> don't need that since they can automatically map bad sectors _on_write_
> (not on read).  Writing to the whole disk should help the drive remap
> all bad sectors.
>
> Once the drive starts to develop bad sectors, the amount of bad sectors
seem to grow experientially, this is at least my experience, so I would not
count on such a drive.

-- 
Ori Idan
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