marking bad blocks on a hard disk drive

[Robert Watson]

On Thu, 24 Jul 2003, Alfonso Romero wrote:

> 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?

If the bad blocks are not under any vital file system meta-data (boot
blocks, inodes, et al), you can use the badsect(8) command to create a
file that includes the bad block.  However, you really want to buy a new
hard disk if this one is remotely recent, as it's likely a sign of
impending drive failure. 

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert at fledge.watson.org      Network Associates Laboratories