Hello all,
i've two hard disks.
one 40 GB and one 80 GB.
80 GB has got some physical bad sectors (as far as i know there is no way of removing them, if you still know some way, plz. let me know).
40 GB disk is primary master and i'm keeping the 80 GB as slave.

Now someone told me that the physical bad sectors of slave can corrupt my 40 GB hard disk too. This doesn't seems logical. But to be on safer side i would request you guys to put some light on this issue.

regards

I don't think that bad sectors on one disk can corrupt another. But I do think it's usually a sign that the disk is dying so you better backup anything you need... I guess the one thing it could do is make your system unbootable if you have a key partition (like /usr) on the disk with bad sectors and the disk fails...

Download a hard drive utility from the manufacture and scan the drive. The utility should mark the sectors and linked the unused sectors of the hard drive to be set to hold data. All hard drives comes with 125% (I think) of the rated space. No you can not use this extra space because it is used if there are any bad sectors.

The person that said that drive B will get corrupted if drive A has corrupt sectors is an idiot. Drive B will not get affected by bad sectors by drive A. Though all hard drives can fail to work if the voltage is not kept within limits.

You might want to find out the boundary of the bad sectors and then partition the hdd such that you leave out the bad sectors and only use the good ones (only easy if the bad sectors are all in one place). However, if you use the hdd own diagnostics tool you might save your self a lot of hassle as it will automatically mark those sectors as bad and never allow anything to be written to them. one last advice, do not count on the disk though, bad sectors are a sign that the disk is failing hence, backup everything you can't lose.