ATA failure with 4.6.2 & 250GB drive?

[Scott Mitchell]

Hi Kevin,

As always, a most enlightening response :-)

On Tue, Oct 14, 2003 at 09:02:14AM -0700, Kevin Oberman wrote:
> It's a real drive problem, but possibly not a terminal one. (I had the
> same issue on one of my drives a few months ago and it's fine now.)
...
> The fix/workaround is to move the file(s) involved so that the damaged
> blocks are marked free and relocated to spar space on the drive. You
> can try to figure out just which file(s) use those blocks. There
> might even be a reasonable way to do this...I just don't know what it
> is.
> 
> Another "fix"is to simply copy the drive onto another and then copy it
> back. dd(1) will do the trick as will dump/restore. (I'd suggest the
> dump/restore to copy the data out and dd to copy it back if the disks
> have identical geometries.) Once the data is restored to the original
> disk, the bad blocks will have been re-directed by the drive and will
> no longer trouble you.

I'll probably pull it out and run the Maxtor diagnostics over it to see
if they turn up anything interesting.  Do you think a low-level format
would be useful?

Very annoying to have two of these things die almost immediately after
installation.  Does not encourage me to buy more Maxtor products in the
future :-(

	Scott

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