Bad sectors on Hard Disk
Hi All!
During booting my Debian 6 - Squeeze (updated with all currently available patches), and after about a Month of successful work, I encountered the messages about problems in sectors reading, some message like "BAD media", with exit code 0x9. These messages were posted in the boot point after GDM was succ. started. After entering the DiskUtility, I saw that hard disk had "a few of bad sectors". Even the MBR was mentioned in the dialog box. Is there any kind of utility for Squeeze to eliminate these bad sectors? My disk is 2 years old, 250GB Segate device. I tried to reinstall grub and performed file checking, but the problem persisted. Comparing to Ubuntu distro, I noticed the following: Ubuntu 9.10 (installed before Squeeze) reminded me at such a kind of problem just after the installation; but, after pooling updates, the warning disappeared, and never more arose. Also, on Debian Lenny (was there before Ubuntu 9.10) I didn't encounter any kind of problems (that is, Lenny didn't recognize any bad sectors at all). Can I conclude that Ubuntu 9.10 automatically marked these sectors as bad (i.e. added them in the sectors black-list) and continued to work normally, while Squeeze can not do this? Regards, D.S. |
No. It's time to replace the disk. It's not a question of what Squeeze can and cannot do. If the OS is seeing bad sectors, then the drive has already exhausted its pool of spare blocks.
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AlucardZero is correct, best course of action is replace the disk. I would add the following.
At least here in the states Seagate drives carry a 5 year warranty, so I would investigate that. You should also get a hold of the Seagate disk utilities (from their website), they will test the drive and provide detailed information about any problems. If there is some reason you can't replace the drive you might try the software called SpinRite (www.grc.com) it is data recovery software. Be warned though, because of the way it works, depending on what is wrong with the drive it may repair it or kill it and it can take days to run. |
I had a similar issue. I had 6 reported bad sectors and that was enough to freeze my system (temporarily or permanently) at times.
I reinstalled my system on a different hard disk and i reformatted (dd bs=16M if=/dev/zero of=yourdiskdevice) the faulty partition and the bad sectors were no longer reported in SMART. |
You've right!
The best solution is to replace the HD. I hope I'll survive somehow the procedure of new installation. Thank You, and best regards! D.S. |
Regarding the local Segate's disks
To "never say never"
The quality of HDs in the USA is, probably, high enough to survive 5 years; but in my area, mostly, we have "yellow" components, assembled somewhere at the Far East, and delivered here "under the desk", that means - without quality pass procedure completed. For that reason SW doesn't work entirely well, problems arise with "plug and cry" components' drivers and so on, and so on. No matter of that, thank You and have a good time! D.S. |
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