Re: [smartmontools-support]Re: LibPATA code issues / 2.6.16 (previously, 2.6.15.x)

[Leon Woestenberg <leonw@mailcan.com>]

Hi all,

On Fri, 2006-04-21 at 17:05 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 21 Apr 2006, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Agreed, though the original poster had already done a 400GB dd from
> > /dev/zero...
> 
> Yes, but to a _file_ on the partition (ie he didn't overwrite any existign 
> data, just the empty parts of a filesystem).
> 
> I realize that it's not enough for the "re-allocate on write" behaviour, 
> and for that you really _do_ need to re-write the whole disk to get all 
> the broken blocks reallocated, but my argument was just that we should 
> make sure to _tell_ people when they are overwriting all their old data ;)
> 
I did not realize this before, and asked badblocks maintainer Theodore
if badblocks /some/file was supported (the man page says no); but of
course any filesystem can decide to re-allocate blocks for a file.

However, for large files where parts may be bad sectors, I am still
searching for a way to read, then re-write every physical sector
occupied by the file. 

With the purpose to remap the bad sectors inside large MPEG files (where
I would rather have a few zeroed holes than a read error in them).

Anyone know such tooling exists? I suspect it has to use filesystem
specific IOCTL's to query for the blocks involved.

Regards,

Leon