Dear Linux Experts,

I'm working in a big n successful IT compny as a customer support engineer .
Just being brief, One of our customer having IBM xseries 225 server which is having 36*4GB scsi hdd with hardware RAID controller. The server is configured in RAID 5. Operation system is RH Linux 8.0. server have 3 hdds in array and 1 in hotspare. few days ago, one msg is displaying on the screen regularly saying something that sector no xxxxxxx read I/O error. I thought that it contains bad sectors. I tried to repartitioned the hdd. I've used "check bad blocks" option during formatting and mounting patns. After completion of all this, when installation process going ahead to format those partitions, its giving msg that "/dev/sda1 contains bad sectors.press enter reboot the system". and its not allowing to install the linux with that option. My question is that is there any way to find out that if a hdd contains bad sector which is participating as a member of raid 5 array. and how to mark those bad sectors without losing any data. Is it true that if somebody format the partitions using the option "check bad bloks", system performance will degrade.

If these are hot-swappable drives, there probably is an indicator light which indicates if one of the drives is bad. Sometimes reseating the drive will cause it to rebuild and fix the problem. If the drive is is malfunctioning, then it should be replaced.

I think that the device /dev/sda1 refers to a partition built on top of the raid array. You did say that the customer is using hardware raid and not software raid.

No body is to help me ????