My harddrive has deveolped a few bad sectors.. causeing some major probs with my Slackware install. Now with windows I could do a full format and have it remove bad blocks or eracse them or something and I could again use the drive...

I cannot figure out how to do this w/ slackware or linux. I have tried formatting and repartioning.. but everytime I try to install it hangs about 10% into the install... (this happens with slackware, mandrake & redhat)

Does anyone know what I should do?? I would use a win98 bootup disk.. but I dont have one anylonger and would perfer to let linux perfrom this task

thanks
trey

p.s. DSL kicks

1. You shouln't use a hd having bad sectors. There are probably coming more and your data is not in safe. By a new one.

2. If you want to, you can use -c parameter for mkfs when making the filesystem (aka formatting) to run a badblock check and mark them bad for the drive.

Get a new drive; this is trouble waiting to happen

lol.. I have used drives with bad sectors before. I do not keep anything life or death on my system anyways, so I will wait to get a new drive if i cant get this one to work again

get the low level formatter for that brand of drive. that's way better than what you're planning to do. hard drives come with extra sectors on them, and the low level formatter can remap the bad sectors to the unused space.

When you install Slackware, you will come to a part where you choose a file system for each of your partitions. You can have it check for bad blocks then. It's one of the options that you are given.

Nowadays HD:s do that automaticly, bad sectors start to emerge to the user/OS only after the spare space is totally used.

ok.. I tried all of the above suggestions.. nothing will install to this drive.... I will be purchasing a new drive... & looks like I will be using DSL for a few days (this thing is super fast when loaded into ram)

Thanks for all the suggestions.

Before you use cfdisk or fdisk and after you have log in as root run this command
"dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1"

This basically "zeros out" your partition table. I found I had to do this inorder to install Slackware over a Redhat or Mandrake distribution. Note that command may need to be changed if you are using scsi drives or have several drives.

I'll give this a whirl tomorrow! thanks for the suggestion!

Is that sorta like the Star Trek 2nd Generation episode where Beverly Crusher is stuck in a warp bubble and her whole universe starts disappearing around her?

You're logged in as root and then start zeroing out all the bits around you on the hard drive until your root existence disappears?

Hmmm.... how does it continue once the dd command location on the hard drive has gone to zeroes?

Just curious.

Go to the site of your HD brand. You'll probably find a tool that can help you, like powermax for maxtor...

The bitsize and count options limit the zeros to the first sector which is where Redhat and Mandrake put their boot loader. The command just zeros out the MBR. Then when you run cfdisk you start with a clean partition table.

Problem resolved... it was bad RAM!