RE: Blockbusting news, results get worse

Mudama, Eric
2003-10-27T17:43:11Z

> -----Original Message-----
> Yeah, I need to deliberately damage one block in order to
> test the firmware, but I don't want to damage multiple
> blocks and use up the reallocation space. I am a home
> user, even if I also do programming at work, even if I
> also volunteer one day each weekend to test Linux. How can I
> arrange to damage one block on a disk?

Um... you can do that by shorting various pins on the PCBA if you have
access to an oscilloscope, or put it under heavy write workload and remove
power.

A modern drive has many thousands of reassign sectors available, so I don't
think either of these events will cause a permanent issue.

I'd also suggest reading older ATA specs, since some vendors still support
older commands that were capable of various wierdness that might be useful.

--eric