hard drive errors

[Chuck Swiger]

David Bear wrote:
> I am receiving the following errors on my hard drive. This appears to
> affect some file in /var/log. My question is twofold. 1) shouldn't ufs
> notice this sector as being unuseable and mark it offlimites? 2) if
> not, is there a way to mark it so manually?

Sure, by default, modern drives will notice and replace failing sectors using 
spare ones.  The error message you are seeing very probably indicates that the 
drive has enough bad sectors that it has run out of spares and is going to 
completely fail very soon.

Back up your data ASAP....

-- 
-Chuck