I ran through the RH 9 install last night, electing to check the drive before proceeding.

Its a brand new (two months or so) IBM/Hitachi 120gb 7200rpm 8mb buffer drive, and the install process said it found 'bad blocks', and suggested I use a different drive. It didnt give me the option to repair the drive (is there such an option?) or mark the blocks as bad, et cetera.

Id REALLY hate to ditch this drive, and Im hoping there's a way around things. I found this post which references the e2fsck tool.

Note that nothing is on this hard drive at the moment; Ive already wiped it and was about to install RH. If I boot from the RH install CD and choose the 'rescue' option, will I still be able to use this tool? The RH install went through the automatic partitioning for me before checking, would it still be listed as /dev/hdax?

This particular machine is at home, and I'll be troubleshooting it this evening when I get there, but since its my only connection to the Internet, Im stuck if I have a question mid-process.

Anyone used the e2fsck tool on a drive with bad blocks? Can I mark them as bad and move on? Or repair them altogether?

Thanks.

hell yes, i use the e2fsck check every day.
if ur not happy with ur hdd, i'm more than happy do take it off your hands.
i think your hard drive will be fine if it's quite new, but if it's giving you some problems in operation, you should take it back and get a different one, although Hitachi will probably just give say "We don't support non-microsoft filesystems"

The past week i instaled red hat 9.0 in a partition where i before had red hat 7.2 and the same error ocurred to me.
But i have a dual boot system and i restarted in windows and deleted the linux partitions with boot magic 7.
After that i did the partitioning again but the check for bad blocks detected errors again ... so i only had one posibility, create a fat32 partition and do a full scandisk.
That worked and i deleted that partition and do the partitioning for linux. No more bad blocks in the check.
When i runed again the install i didn't marked the option to check for bad blocks (what you don't see don't hurt you )

Maybe formating the partition without bad blocks check will be a way... but you will have to run a fsck later to fix it.

The first time through the install it failed because it said it couldnt read from the media. Since it copies the files to the HD before install, it meant it couldnt read from that portion of the drive....and that the part that failed had been written to one of those bad blocks.

Id rather know about something wrong during the install, as opposed to down the line when Im about to lose data.

I have a diagnostic utility from IBM/Hitachi for the drive I'll try, and I'll do the rescue option with the boot cd as well. Hopefully one of the two will work.

Ive run the e2fsck tool, the manufacturer's diagnostic tool, AND the scandisk utility that comes with Windows...all of which said the drive had nothing wrong with it.

Every single install attempt of RH 9 fails; either 'installation terminated abnormally' or 'cannot read xx package' (different one listed each time).

Slackware installed on this same drive a few days ago without a problem; what else can I try? The MD5SUMs and the media check during the install checked out fine, is it still possible I got a bum iso?

This was sorted. Another post on LQ.o referenced a RAM checking utility called memtest86, which I located and installed.

Two of the RAM chips were bad; after removing them the install went as expected.