Hello,

I have five old 250 GB hard drives that I would like to run, ideally as root partition, in a RAID 5 or RAID 6 array on a debian system. Unfortunately, some of the hard drives have bad blocks on it, and it seems that the reserved space for hardware bad block relocation has dried up.

I have read the stuff about "do not use drives that have bad blocks", nevertheless I want to try it. I have some mixed experience with mdadm and bad blocks and I have read something about EVMS (Enterprise Volume Management System) that sounds pretty appealing to me: the feature to have EVMS manage your bad blocks.

Problem is, it seems that EVMS is not maintained any more and may not be working under debian lenny, however under etch.

My questions focus around the following:
- Is there any other hard drive management software under Linux (like LVM2) that has a software bad block relocation and is more recommended to use than EVMS
- If not, is it recommended to install EVMS with an old etch distribution just for the use as a file server or does that in the long run lead to trouble with recovering the data in times of failure

Any advice is highly appreciated.

Best regards,

linuxnomo

If you are looking for something like EVMS you probably just have one option, LVM.
Don't know if it does bad-block-relocation though.