Peter wrote:
Afaik modern drives do the mapping silently using spare sectors in
each track. You get bad blocks when the drive runs out of spare sectors.
It seems that this is not exactly correct. Modern drives do automatic
remapping if and only if they managed to correctly read the data once
after finding out it's a bad sector. Otherwise, they will not create
silent data corruption, and will report said sector as bad despite
having free sectors to map to (http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/,
search for "Where can I find manufacturer-specific disk-testing
utilities?").
A low level format is, indeed, the right thing to do in such a case. The
above link points to a place
(http://www.benchmarkhq.ru/english.html?/be_hdd2.html) that list a whole
set of low level bad sectors remapping tools.
Peter
Shachar
--
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Source Consulting ltd.
http://www.lingnu.com/
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