From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Jul 24 16:02:49 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 22BDF37B401 for ; Thu, 24 Jul 2003 16:02:49 -0700 (PDT) Received: from kanga.honeypot.net (kanga.honeypot.net [208.162.254.122]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CA3EC43F3F for ; Thu, 24 Jul 2003 16:02:47 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from kirk@strauser.com) Received: from pooh.honeypot.net.strauser.com (kirk@pooh.honeypot.net [10.0.5.128]) by kanga.honeypot.net (8.12.9/8.12.9) with ESMTP id h6OMNsFl008115 for ; Thu, 24 Jul 2003 17:24:55 -0500 (CDT) (envelope-from kirk@strauser.com) To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org References: <002501c35218$51d7dd60$0100a8c0@ibacsoft.dynu.com> From: Kirk Strauser Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 17:23:53 -0500 Message-ID: <87oezjfts6.fsf@pooh.honeypot.net> Lines: 24 X-Mailer: Gnus/5.1002 (Gnus v5.10.2) Emacs/21.3 (gnu/linux) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/signed; boundary="=-=-="; micalg=pgp-sha1; protocol="application/pgp-signature" Subject: Re: marking bad blocks on a hard disk drive X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 23:02:49 -0000 --=-=-= Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable At 2003-07-24T19:17:57Z, Alfonso Romero writes: > I=B4m installing FreeBSD 4.8 on a 8GB HDD, but it has some bad sectors. H= ow > can I tell FreeBSD not to use these bad sectors? You really wouldn't want to, even if you could. Why? Because most (all) modern drives are shipped with unaddressable sectors that they use to logically replace bad sectors as they are detected. Now, add the fact that drive platters tend to show decay exponentially; whenever all of their magnetic zones are far within margins of error, you don't see any problems, but when the zone start to approach tolerances, many begin to flip back and forth across the failure level at the roughly the same time. For a biological analogy, imagine that you have a large population of creatures born at the same time. Some will die young, but then the death rate will taper to a l This means that your drive has reached the condition that many of its sectors are beginning to die, and that it's exhausted its pool of "hot backups". Expect to begin seeing the errors increase dramatically until it dies in the somewhat near future. =2D-=20 Kirk Strauser --=-=-= Content-Type: application/pgp-signature -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQA/IFx55sRg+Y0CpvERAmUcAJ9sCTcRJtIOZNVfxHks9AwJOeyRlgCfQUss 6M7qSiKhbjLYCLDDsnuQL4k= =C/gi -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --=-=-=--