Subject: Re: Preparing for linux / Scandisk question
From: James Zuelow (e5z8652@zuelow.net)
Date: Fri Dec 20 2002 - 23:42:53 AKST
On Fri, 20 Dec 2002 22:53:15 -0900
"Grant Stockly" <grant@stockly.com> wrote:
>
> I want to prepare a laptop hard drive for linux, but it has a clump
> of bad clusters towards the end. Sometimes these bad clusters are
> just "slow" and it takes a real long time to read from them.
> Windows Scandisk might not think that 10 seconds to read 50k is a
> long time, but I do. Are there any programs out there where you can
> set the threshold for bad sector detection?
>
> I'd like to fix these problems and get on with it.
>
> Grant
>
Hmm. Well I don't think you can set a threshold time with badblocks,
but you could certainly excersize the disk a bit and probably get
those sectors & any other iffy ones mapped out with badblocks.
You could try `badblocks -wvp 10` which would write patterns to the
disk, mapping bad blocks, until it got 10 passes with no changes.
That should be enough to catch any sectors that are sometimes bad and
sometimes just slow. However badblocks -w takes a LONG time to run,
and I imagine that badblocks -wvp 10 would take forever. As in start
it on Saturday morning, and check it sometime Sunday if this disk is
any size at all.
You'd probably want to use the -o option to write the bad blocks to a
file (on a floppy I guess, if you use badblocks from something like
Tom's Root Boot), and then when you repartitioned the drive & put a
file system on it, you can tell e2fs/e3fs where the bad sectors are by
reading in the file.
Might be other, faster ways of doing it but I always end up using
badblocks.
Cheers,
James
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