[continued from previous message]   
      
   > defect list, reset them, and had the drive scan for bad blocks.   
   > What was interesting, is the drive exactly reproduced the same   
   > defect list as was present in the lists. This is just in case   
   > you were thinking "oh, those blocks aren't really bad and   
   > a re-scan would uncover lots of good blocks, if only I could   
   > reset the automatic sparing system". In my tests, what I discovered   
   > at the time, is no, resetting any automatic sparing would   
   > achieve nothing. Still, this is a natural hypothesis for users   
   > to reach, that if only they could give the automatic sparing   
   > a whack upside the head, their drive would be "rendered new again".   
   > It's not true. The drive does make good, high quality determinations   
   > of its bad blocks. When it tells you a block is bad, it's bad.   
   > And reproducibly so. These were the first full height 5MB and   
   > 10MB Seagate consumer drives (complete with floppy-like head movement   
   > and stepper motors for driving the head in and out instead of a   
   > voice coil).   
   >   
   >    Paul   
   >   
      
   Around 20 years ago, I foind that using:   
      
   # fsck -y -C -V /dev/sda(x)   
      
   the (x) represents a partition number example.   
      
   would either solve dive error problems, sometimes permanently, often   
   for  short time, indicating the drive was o its way out.   
      
   Alternatively to check for bad blocks I used:   
      
   # /sbin/dumpe2fs /dev/sda(x) | grep 'Block size'   
      
   which returned:  Blok size : 4096   
   and then ran:   
      
   #badblocks -b 4096 -s -v /dev/sda(x)   
      
   To copy  a partition converting bad blocks to null bytes, I recoded two   
   commands but I cannot recall ever using them myself:   
      
   # dd if-/dev/sd(source) of=/dev/sd(target) conv=noerror, sync   
      
   or   
      
   # ddrescue -d-v /dev/sd(source) /dev/sd(target)  /home//logfile   
      
   I hope that's helpful. No guarantees   
      
   Regards,  Alan   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)