marking bad blocks on a hard disk drive

[Andy Farkas]

Alfonso Romero wrote:

> I=B4m 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?

Like others have said, your disk is dying and is untrustworthy for holding
critical data.

But no one has answered your question yet, so I will :)

I also have a 8gig drive with bad blocks on it. I only use it on a scratch
box for testing -current. I don't trust it at all, and will toss it in the
bin as soon as it plays up again.

After running various formatters and scanners, I identifyied where the bad
sectors were on the disk, around the 6gig mark on mine. The bad section
was about 20-30MB long.

Knowing this, I can now setup partitions around the bad bit. I created a
5.5 gig partition 1, a 1 gig partition 2 (the bad bits), and 1.5 gig
partition 3.

Hope that helps.

--

 :{ andyf at speednet.com.au

        Andy Farkas
    System Administrator
   Speednet Communications
 http://www.speednet.com.au/