The need for initialising disks before use?

[Brooks Davis]

On Fri, Aug 18, 2006 at 09:19:04AM -0500, Kirk Strauser wrote:
> On Thursday 17 August 2006 8:35 am, Antony Mawer wrote:
> 
> > A quick question - is it recommended to initialise disks before using
> > them to allow the disks to map out any "bad spots" early on?
> 
> Note: if you once you actually start seeing bad sectors, the drive is almost 
> dead.  A drive can remap a pretty large number internally, but once that 
> pool is exhausted (and the number of errors is still growing 
> exponentially), there's not a lot of life left.

There are some exceptions to this.  The drive can not remap a sector
which failes to read.  You must perform a write to cause the remap to
occur.  If you get a hard write failure it's gameover, but read failures
aren't necessicary a sign the disk is hopeless.  For example, the drive
I've had in my laptop for most of the last year developed a three sector[0]
error within a week or so of arrival.  After dd'ing zeros over the
problem sectors the problem sectors I've had no problems.

-- Brooks

[0] The error occured in one of the worst possible locations and fsck
could not complete until I zeroed those locations.  That really sucked.
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