From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S263301AbTJUUti (ORCPT ); Tue, 21 Oct 2003 16:49:38 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S263308AbTJUUti (ORCPT ); Tue, 21 Oct 2003 16:49:38 -0400 Received: from tmr-02.dsl.thebiz.net ([216.238.38.204]:19716 "EHLO gatekeeper.tmr.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S263301AbTJUUtN (ORCPT ); Tue, 21 Oct 2003 16:49:13 -0400 To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Path: gatekeeper.tmr.com!davidsen From: davidsen@tmr.com (bill davidsen) Newsgroups: mail.linux-kernel Subject: Re: Blockbusting news, this is important (Re: Why are bad disk sectors numbered strangely, and what happens to them?) Date: 21 Oct 2003 20:39:11 GMT Organization: TMR Associates, Schenectady NY Message-ID: References: <32a101c3916c$e282e330$5cee4ca5@DIAMONDLX60> <200310171935.h9HJZaLm002335@81-2-122-30.bradfords.org.uk> X-Trace: gatekeeper.tmr.com 1066768751 19298 192.168.12.62 (21 Oct 2003 20:39:11 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@tmr.com Originator: davidsen@gatekeeper.tmr.com Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org In article , Krzysztof Halasa wrote: | John Bradford writes: | | > My most important point is that writes should never fail on a good | > drive. | | That's certainly what the drives do. Unless they are out of spare | sectors, of course. | | Doing cat /dev/zero > /dev/hd* fixes all bad sectors on modern drive. Flash from the past, back in the days of MFM drives, and "new" RLL controllers, we wrote software which regularly read all the data off a track with appropriate retries, reformatted the track, wrote the data, and read it back to verify. This was because of 'sector walk" which made the sectors move relative to the IRG. And we wrote our own device drivers to use large sectors to get more capacity, those were the days. However, that's the kind of thing I would hope S.M.A.R.T. could do, with relocation of course. -- bill davidsen CTO, TMR Associates, Inc Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.