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Date:      Thu, 21 Feb 2002 17:25:24 -0600
From:      "Mike Meyer" <mwm-dated-1014765924.51ab47@mired.org>
To:        Robin Becker <robin@reportlab.com>
Cc:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: hard disk errors
Message-ID:  <15477.33252.197082.914224@guru.mired.org>
In-Reply-To: <42557766@toto.iv>

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Robin Becker <robin@reportlab.com> types:
> In article <15476.2903.219792.310210@guru.mired.org>, Mike Meyer <mwm-
> dated-1014670039.417d3e@mired.org> writes
> >> What should I be doing? I have backups, but this is our cvs server and
> >> messing around is not desirable. Does the boss need to splash out on a
> >> whole new machine?
> >Most likely, the drive is about to die, and the boss needs to splash
> >out for a new drive. it might be the cable or motherboard, but it's
> >unlikely to be one of those unless you've been mucking around inside
> >the machine recently.
> that's what I figured. When I was a lot younger there was something
> called bad-blocking drives, but it seems that is hard to do with modern
> eide drives.

The trick as I remember it was to create some obscurely-named file,
and use a program that tweaked the file system to put bad blocks into
that file. You could still do that, but there's not a lot of point to
it. Modern drives have blocks they don't tell you about, and will
automatically switch to one of those when a write fails. So when you
start seeing multiple hard errors, it means that all the reserved
blocks are being used, your drive has lots of bad blocks on it, and is
about to fail bigtime.

	<mike
--
Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.

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