I want to use the low cost high capacity hard drives that are for sale in places like Best Buy and Costco. I have put ext3 on several of them and started experimenting. The results so far are puzzling.
I do get errors. So I decided to do scans for bad blocks. The drives I'm using are all Western Digital because they have been the lowest cost at the times I buy at Costco. Also all are 500GB. e2fsck -c <device> is supposed to scan for bad blocks and allocate them to a special inode so that they cannot be used. It runs for 3 to 4 hours and then says its finished with no indication of how many bad blocks it found. dumpe2fs -b <device> is supposed to print the bad blocks that have been marked on a device. When I run it, it prints nothing. I find it hard to believe that a 500GB HD contains ZERO bad blocks. Especially one on which I have witnessed error messages about I/O errors in writing the journal. I can find no information about what, exactly, dumpe2fs is supposed to print. The wording seems to be that it prints the contents of the bad blocks. But in other places it seems that it prints a list of block numbers, or maybe cylinder/sector/head. Since I see nothing, I don't have a clue as to what I should see. Has anyone ever used these programs? Have you ever seen useful output? What SHOULD they do (with a little more specificity and believability)? -- Paul E Condon pecon...@mesanetworks.net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100409004433.ga2...@big.lan.gnu
