Re: Bad Blocks

["Jorge R . Csapo" <jorge@completo.com.br>]

assim falou Abiy,Mike [Edm] (em 19/09/2002):
> I would like to apologize, first, if this happens to be a simple question.
> 
> 1. How does one test for bad blocks on a hard drive in linux.
> 
> 2. More important, how does one render a bad block on hard drive unreadable,
> so that the bad block utility that was used( whatever it may be)  and/or
> program does not try to write or read to this same bad block, resulting in
> the same errors happening again and again.

mkfs -c does just that, addressing both 1. and 2. 

> 
> 3. This was necessitated by trips to a remote site from remote power bootup
> ( sometime it is absolutely necessary to do that) to do a manual fsck,
> because the linux box stops the normal bootup process awaiting manual
> intervention to do manual fsck.

This is totally configurable, meaning the necessity for a manual fsck can
simply be removed. You can either prevent Linux from fsck'ing at boot (not a
really good idea) or force fsck at every boot but with options that don't
require manual intervention. The way to do this depends on your distro, but
it may involve editing /etc/inittab, a number of /etc/rc.d files, re-creating
your filesystems or all of the above...

-- 
Jorge R. Csapo
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