Re: Linux 2.6.3-rc3 - IDE DMA errors on Thinkpad A30

Jeff Garzik
2004-02-16T02:14:44Z

Chip Salzenberg wrote:
> According to Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz:
>
>>On Sunday 15 of February 2004 17:34, Chip Salzenberg wrote:
>>
>>>http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2110
>>>
>>>I've also included the SMART error dumps ("smartctl -a"). There are
>>>no media problems, if I'm reading it right; whatever else is broken,
>>>the IDE DMA errors seem to be unrelated to actual bad sectors.
>>
>>There is a media error at sector 4682265. :-(
>
>
> Damn. Is there a HOWTO on forcing the remapping of a known bad sector?

Ideally the drive should do it automatically, and if it can't remap,
it's run out of spare sectors to remap bad ones to (uh oh).

Really the best policy IMO is just to run 'e2fsck -c' every so often
until you can get your data off this disk, and throw it in the garbage.
That does the "remapping" at the filesystem level, which is IMO easier
than bothering with low-level ATA commands.

I'm a bit fuzzy on SMART and Device Configuration Overlay and need to
review. Those are sets of ATA commands, and they -might- allow you to
remap at a low-level. I know vendor-specific commands exist to do
precisely what you want, but those are unfortunately NDA'd and I don't
know them, just that they exist...

Jeff