Re: [offtopic] badblocks and e2fsck

Matthias Andree (mandree@sx1.HRZ.Uni-Dortmund.DE)
Thu, 15 Oct 1998 10:59:34 +0200


On Tue, Oct 13, 1998 at 07:36:13PM -0500, Jerry Geis wrote:
> Gents
>
> It appears that my disk has some badblocks. I
> am attempting to run 'e2fsck -cf /dev/hda4'
> to clear it up. It says that it is detecting
> them and fixing them but then I run the same
> command and it finds the same ones again.
> Is this normal? I would think it would already
> now the sector is bad and not try it.
>
> Anyway, it appears it is not fixing the problem.
>
> AM I mising something?

Yes. There is no option to tell badblocks that there are already bad
blocks. So, badblocks finds those bad blocks regardless of if they are
already known to the file system.

You should however try to reassign defective sectors, for SCSI drives,
you can try sformat by Jörg Schily (should be on SunSITE if I recall
correctly), for IDE drives, you will probably need to check with the
vendor, many of them provide you with a free disk analysis/repair tool
(like Western Digital).

When using Jörg Schily's sformat (which was originally written for Sun
boxes), make sure you have enough sga..sgx symlinks in /dev since
otherwise some devices might not show up in the list.

-- 
Matthias Andree

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