How to replace a hard drive...

[Giles Orr]

I have a couple of USB flash drives that give me I/O errors whenever I
copy stuff to a specific spot on the drive.  ie. when I get to the 6Gb
mark on one, whatever the file is I'm writing to the drive, it fails.
If I run "fsck.vfat" against the drive, it always finds an error and
fixes it ... and then I have exactly the same problem again.  Now I
read Lennart's view on fsck in the thread about bad hard drives:

On 5 May 2011 12:45, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 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.

The man page says "dosfsck - check and repair MS-DOS file systems".
So it moves stuff around but doesn't tag bad sectors?  That doesn't
seem like much of a fix.  Does this solution also apply to flash
drives?  (That is, I should reformat them with a badblock check?)
These drives don't seem to be remapping on write ...

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists