bad sectors on harddrive
 

Hi all.

I have a 80gb seagate harddrive. I've run a seagate diagnostic tool on it, and it found some bad sectors... So I did a little studying on the net, and found that ext2/3 filesystems support blocking of bad sectors.

This is not my primary drive, but I thought that I might as well use it for movies / mp3s etc...

So I made one big partition on it with fdisk, but when I did 'mkfs.ext3 -c -c /dev/hdb1' to make the filesystem and do a destructive test it did not report a single error.

So I'm thinking is badblocks not able to find my bad sectors? or has it marked them silently?

I know which sectors are bad (seagate tools told me) so is there any way I can check the list of bad sectors on the fs or define them manually (after creation)???

Hope anyone knows, Thanx

"I've run a seagate diagnostic tool on it, and it found some bad sectors..."

Seagate (and every other drive manufacturer) puts some extra blocks at the end of the disk. When you run the low level Seagate utility, one of the options is to redirect bad block to the extra blocks at the end. Did you select this option when you ran the Seagate diagnostic program? Maybe it is the default. If the Seagate diagnostic program redirected the addresses of the bad blocks to the extra blocks then 'mkfs.ext3 -c -c /dev/hdb1' will find a hardware error free disk.

"I know which sectors are bad (seagate tools told me) so is there any way I can check the list of bad sectors on the fs or define them manually (after creation)???"

Is there any way that you can ask the Seagate diagnostic to report which bad blocks have been readdressed to a spare block?

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