Date: Sun, 18 Nov 2001 12:45:10 +0000 From: Scott Mitchell <scott.mitchell@mail.com> To: Nils Holland <nils@tisys.org> Cc: David Loszewski <stealth215@mediaone.net>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: harddrive error Message-ID: <20011118124510.J272@localhost> In-Reply-To: <20011118130628.Q935-100000@jodie.ncptiddische.net>; from nils@tisys.org on Sun, Nov 18, 2001 at 01:12:43PM %2B0100 References: <20011118115024.I272@localhost> <20011118130628.Q935-100000@jodie.ncptiddische.net>
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On Sun, Nov 18, 2001 at 01:12:43PM +0100, Nils Holland wrote: > On Sun, 18 Nov 2001, Scott Mitchell wrote: > > > BTW, the drive tester may well offer to do some kind of low-level format on > > the drive to 'repair' it. This may well appear to work, but if my > > experience is anything to go by, a genuinely bad drive will just start > > failing again soon after, so I wouldn't bother. > > Low-level format, especially if done with tools and procedures not > explicitly recommended by the manufacturer, can be a risky thing. In > general, it should not be neccessary to do a low level format on modern > drives (in fact, a few years back there used to be a low-level format > utility present in many BIOSes, which is no longer the case) - if the need > arises, it is well possible that something else and much more serious is > about to fail. Yes, 'low-level format' was probably a poor choice of words on my part. The function I'm thinking of does essentially what Nils describes below -- scrubs the entire disk, checking each block and marking all the bad blocks as such. I'm not sure whether the IBM tool I used recently (on an IBM drive) did this properly or not -- it pronounced the drive to be healthy and all seemed to be well for a few weeks until the fatal read errors came back again. I have no idea if these were on the same blocks as before or new ones that had gone bad since. The drive has since been replaced by IBM (3 year warranty is a Good Thing!). > If you do a low-level format wrong, the "bad blocks" on your HDD that were > already marked as bad in the factory or during your use of the drive will > be made available for data storage again. A proper low-level format tool > from your manufacturer should properly handle this and make sure that > these blocks remain marked as bad. A wrong tool may, however, make these > bad blocks available for data storage again. This means that your problems > may be gone for a short time, until your HDD has tried to store some data > on these bad blocks, after which it will complain again, and everything > will start all over again... Absolutely. Only use the tools provided by the drive manufacturer. Personally, I'd just get the thing replaced as soon as it started behaving badly, rather than trusting that it had been 'fixed' and having it fail again. Cheers, Scott -- =========================================================================== Scott Mitchell | PGP Key ID | "Eagles may soar, but weasels Cambridge, England | 0x54B171B9 | don't get sucked into jet engines" scott.mitchell@mail.com | 0xAA775B8B | -- Anon To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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