[ltp] Bad hard drive sector

[Uwe Walter]

Hi.

On So, 2006-01-15 at 10:16 -0800, Bill Sheppard wrote:
> So it appears there is a bad sector (or sectors on the hard drive). 
> It's a fairly new Toshiba MK6026GAX 60GB.  I understand the drives are
> supposed to reallocate bad sectors automatically, but it appears it
> isn't since the error persists.

If the drive was unable to *read* the content of the sector, it does not
want to reallocate it yet (data loss), because it *might* be possible
that the sector could be read again in the future.
It is marked pending for reallocation. Some drives show this in their
SMART values, e.g.:

197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0008   253   253   000    Old_age
Offline      -       1


> Any ideas how I can correct this?

You must give up the content of this sector.
Either low level format the drive, or do fill the destroyed file with
zeros on your own:

http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/BadBlockHowTo.txt


> didn't find any other bad sectors in the testing, but might this mean
> the drive is going to be unreliable?

Possibly. If the sector really got corrupt during nominal operation.
There are other possibilities, e.g. if the drive was powered down
exactly during half-way writing the sector. In this case, it is
logically corrupt (but not physically).

I wouldn't trust the drive to hold my most precious data any more.

Post the full output of smartctl -a, but even with that, nobody can tell
you for sure.


Greetings, UW(e)