Bad sectors on HDD
Hello,
A laptop that I need to fix reports that it has 1 bad sector, and I thought that it would be possible to fix it from a linux live cd. I have linux ubuntu 11.04, but I were not able to find a repair function (only the smart scan). Any help would be appreciated |
Member response
Hi,
Welcome to LQ! When you boot the livecd the system should be in single user mode. You can use 'fsck' from the cli; Quote:
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It may not be possible to "repair" it as such. An entire sector being marked bad is a bit odd. Personally, I'd run the hard drive's OEM diags first for more clues as to the state of the drive and maybe controller.
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Quote:
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If the system report a bad sector this almost any times means the the hard disks internal controller already has used up all the spare sectors for covering bad blocks. From my experience this is in 99% a sign for a dying disk. As jefro already suggested it is time to check the disk with the manufacturers diagnosis tool. And of course to back up all valuable data on that disk (which you do regularly anyways, don't you?).
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Whole story:
It was a friends hard drive I was supposed to fix, and I know that it's no good when a bad sector shows up... But since there was only 1 bad sector I was unable to convince my friend that the disk might fail soon, but did give him a warning. Anyway, I figured that It might be a soft error, since smart didn't show any other signs of old age or probable failure (the are two types soft and hard bad sectors for those who don't know) - these require formatting the disk to fix, but couldn't format the disk since it was full of data. Ubuntu CD was my first attempt, after I couldn't find a repair tool on it, I looked up Hiren's boot CD that had a program to fix bad sectors. (Just some info in case anyone encounters similar problems.) |
You should have used the OEM disk to diag the hard drive. You can't out figure the factory diags.
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