marking bad blocks on a hard disk drive

[Kirk Strauser]

At 2003-07-24T19:17:57Z, Alfonso Romero <ibac at prodigy.net.mx> writes:

> I´m installing FreeBSD 4.8 on a 8GB HDD, but it has some bad sectors. How
> 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.
-- 
Kirk Strauser
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