Hello,

I have an harddisk which is old, since many years >10 years, and I recall I crashed few clusters using windows programs which were old and harddisk stuffs doing.

So the pc lives with bad clusters, this pc lives very well since many years.

Question, the pc has woody debian, which let us to install and exclude bad sectors during install. Bad clusters was an usual thing in the past, but today not anymore.

Unfortunately debian squeeze installer coders had the good idea to remove the " bad cluster checking " before installing debian, during install (cdrom netinst).

So what to do now, in 2010, nowadays to install debian if bad clusters ?

Use the 'badblocks' program before you install. I don't recall if its on the CD or not. Once the blocks are marked bad they won't be written to even if you reboot the system... sounds like you probably had some more blocks on the disk go bad since the original install (not that its a shocking development since it already had bad blocks.)

I've had similar drives, but they've gotten so cheap in the last few years... shrug, I just install new ones.

Can't justify keeping a tiny drive with a known failure impending when a new drive costs <30$ even if you go back and get IDE.

That being said, about 5 years ago I got rid of my last 'old school' drive with bad blocks all over the place... I had performed 'impact maintenance' (nee percussion mechanics, nee smacking it on a desk repeatedly) on it when it got a stuck head and after that it worked flawlessly except where the head had hit the platter for another 4 years when I got rid of it (it was still working, I just needed bigger drives in all the pc's I had around.)