Re: Dying disk and filesystem choice.

Andreas Dilger (adilger@turbolinux.com)
Thu, 24 May 2001 00:58:14 -0600 (MDT)


It was written:
> To keep it short and sweet, I have a 45Gb IBM drive that
> is slowly dying by getting more bad sectors. I have already
> returned my first one to get the current disk, so would like
> to use the current one for a while before returning it for
> another disk that will prolly just start dying again.
>
> I am using reiserfs at the moment, which doesn't really like
> to work on a dying drive. for example, doing a make fails to
> work even though it is *creating* files on the disk, it fails
> to do so because it hits new bad sectors and doesn't seem to
> remap them.
>
> I am wondering what advise on filesystem choice the list as
> and any other options I can use to get the kernel to remap
> bad blocks.

Well reiserfs is probably a very bad choice at this point. It
does not have any bad blocks support (yet), so as soon as you have
a bad block you are stuck.

You should probably use ext2, along with the badblocks program to
check which blocks in the disk are bad. It will do a read-write
test, and either your disk will remap the bad blocks, or they will
be detected.

Even so, keep your backups current...

Cheers, Andreas

-- 
Andreas Dilger  \ "If a man ate a pound of pasta and a pound of antipasto,
                 \  would they cancel out, leaving him still hungry?"
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/               -- Dogbert
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