Hey guys, I have a slight problem. It seems that I do in fact have some bad sectors towards the end of the drive I'm using for Slack. Everything was working well, during the boot process it said the filesystem on /dev/hda3 (my /home partition) was corrupt so it proceeds to check it and after a lil bit it just goes haywire. It just starts listing errors. It goes so fast and keeps going that I don't know if they are the same error or different ones.

My question is this, can I just repartition and format my /home partition without having to reinstall Slack? Will it recognize it when I reboot. I know that the bad sector is somewhere in the last 5gigs of the hard drive. I took a chance and now here I am. I plan on just leaving off 5 gigs when I redo my /home. Will this work? Do I need to adjust any config files or anything because it will be smaller now?


Thanks for any and all advice.

if you are sure you can't fix it, then yes, you can just format it and go... no need to repartition it mind... just make sure the partition isn't mounted which i assume it's not... and format it: "mke2fs -j /dev/hda3" for an ext3 partition. the fstab entries will still be just as valid, so you can just remount it and make any required /home/user directories. In reality you might find it easier to delete and recreate your normal user accounts.

How would I repair bad sectors on a Hard Drive?

as ever i fail to read the whole post correctly...

not something i've needed to do, but you should have the badblocks utility which can scan for bad blocks on a partition. save the output to a file (-o) and pass the file as an option to mke2fs (-l) and it'll skirt around them.

You can't fix bad blocks really, or they'd never be a problem in the first place

You don't, you get a new HDD.

I would really have to question the wisdom of installing on a drive you know to be going bad. Once you start getting bad blocks, the clock is ticking for the entire drive to fail.

You should be more concerned with getting a new drive in the machine, than trying to avoid running into corruption.

I've never had the experience of a hard drive going bad, so I'm sorry for my ignorance. I didn't think it was possible to fix bad sectors, but I don't know everything so when he said to "fix" them, well I thought it might be possible. Thanks.

Moderator can close this thread.

Modern drives hide away bad sectors until the drive is on its last gasp. My recent experience is a that when errors start to appear you only have days left.

Thanks, it sounds like it spreads like a virus. Time to toss that one. Luckily I just bought a 120gig last week for some extra storage.