Formatting a hard disk and handling of suspicious bad sectors
in [Storage]
|
Prev: Finding RAID controller for SSDs?
Next: mysterious discrepancy in the reported free space on two identical usb drives
From: Rod Speed on 14 Feb 2010 13:25 Man-wai Chang to The Door (24000bps) wrote: > When I right-clicked a hard disk in Window$ and hit Format, was it the hard disk controller that took over to format a > particular sector on the disk? Or was it the OS? The OS with normal hard drive controllers. Except that the OS has never formatted a particular sector, it just redoes the file structures and with a long format, check if the sectors are readable. Thats not the best thing now with modern hard drives that spare bad sectors themselves. > I wanted to reduce the fault tolerance level of the formatting process such that it would mark a sector as bad when > there was one single read/write failure. > Right now, the Format process would retry again and again for long > time when a bad sector was hit. I don't want the process to retry, > and just mark it as bad. Just writing to every sector with a decent wiper before the format should work fine because that should get the hard drive itself to spare pending bad sectors. I like Darik's boot and nuke, mainly because it is completely OS independant. http://www.dban.org/
From: Flasherly on 14 Feb 2010 14:42 On Feb 14, 5:36 am, "Man-wai Chang to The Door (24000bps)" <toylet.toy...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > When I right-clicked a hard disk in Window$ and hit Format, was it the > hard disk controller that took over to format a particular sector on the > disk? Or was it the OS? > > I wanted to reduce the fault tolerance level of the formatting process > such that it would mark a sector as bad when there was one single > read/write failure. > > Right now, the Format process would retry again and again for long time > when a bad sector was hit. I don't want the process to retry, and just > mark it as bad. > > -- > @~@ Might, Courage, Vision, SINCERITY. > / v \ Simplicity is Beauty! May the Force and Farce be with you! > /( _ )\ (x86_64 Ubuntu 9.10) Linux 2.6.32.8 > ^ ^ 18:32:01 up 2 days 2:17 0 users load average: 1.12 1.14 1.15 > ä¸å貸! ä¸è©é¨! ä¸æ´äº¤! ä¸æ交! ä¸æå«! ä¸èªæ®º! è«èæ ®ç¶æ´ (CSSA):http://www.swd.gov.hk/tc/index/site_pubsvc/page_socsecu/sub_addressesa Never really had sector issues - per se, those that I'd trust to an OS, being a longtime user of Partition Magic (DOS of course). Errant power conditions or software glitches, whenever those rare instances occur that Windows reports bad sectors -- I just say "no". With a binary backup of the OS, I allow for quick preconditional recoveries by how programs -versus the OS- are structured (located on different drives, partitions/extensions). I've always "organizationally formated out" drives that way - always 3rd party w/out incident. Usually with an option for quick formats. Not that I wouldn't have seen a rare drive or two exhibit churning, problems, though fortunately I've favored mine, not to impose unusual conditions or characteristics that are hard on wear (streaming by different DVD to the same drive, or permitting outlandish fragmentation, for instance). Drives that have failed on me did so summarily -- no if's and but's. These new 1.5 and 2T drives I'm getting into lately may be different, though. Tossing them into quick storage configs with NTFS, so far. Dunno. Were worst to come to worst, I might have a look around -- definitely before Win, that is -- even to the manufacturer's dedicated drive/utility software (anally diagnostically inclined and slow-assed if that's what it takes). Worst I've ever run into was off IBM's site a 486 ThinkPad -- 8 hours to factory format a LLF routine on that sucker.
From: Bryce on 14 Feb 2010 18:03 Rod Speed wrote: > Man-wai Chang to The Door (24000bps) wrote: > >>> One thing you can try is to overwrite the disk/partition >>> before a format. That would trigger the reallocation >>> process for sectors known to be bad. The other option I >>> see is using a "RAID edition" drive or one that does >>> support time limited error recovery and set that. >>> However I have no idea how to do that. > >>> You likely should als run a long SMART selftest and look >>> at the attributes if you have a larger number of sectors >>> with read errors (say,>10), quite possibly the drive is >>> dying. > >> I miss the old way of formatting hard disk (DOS days).... > > You can still boot a dos floppy and do those today if you > want to. > >> bad sectors were detected and marked properly.... > > But the drives of that era did not spare bad sectors > themselves so we dont need the format to do that now. Oh yes ... I remember DOS ... and floppy disks too! Most of today's disks are way too big to do a DOS format without first setting up lots of logical partitions. Writing (anything) to the whole disk takes a long time. That's a good reason to not do it during format. I boot SystemRescueCD and use dd to write zeroes to the whole disk when a controller gets balky about swapping a failed sector.
From: Rod Speed on 14 Feb 2010 20:02 Bryce wrote > Rod Speed wrote >> Man-wai Chang to The Door (24000bps) wrote: >>>> One thing you can try is to overwrite the disk/partition >>>> before a format. That would trigger the reallocation >>>> process for sectors known to be bad. The other option >>>> I see is using a "RAID edition" drive or one that does >>>> support time limited error recovery and set that. >>>> However I have no idea how to do that. >>>> You likely should als run a long SMART selftest and look >>>> at the attributes if you have a larger number of sectors >>>> with read errors (say,>10), quite possibly the drive is dying. >>> I miss the old way of formatting hard disk (DOS days).... >> You can still boot a dos floppy and do those today if you want to. >>> bad sectors were detected and marked properly.... >> But the drives of that era did not spare bad sectors >> themselves so we dont need the format to do that now. > Oh yes ... I remember DOS ... and floppy disks too! > Most of today's disks are way too big to do a DOS > format without first setting up lots of logical partitions. Wrong. You can format the entire drive with one partition if you want. The only real downside with a DOS format is that you cant format NTFS. > Writing (anything) to the whole disk takes a long time. > That's a good reason to not do it during format. If you dont like the time it takes, you can just write to the pending sectors you have identified using the SMART report. > I boot SystemRescueCD and use dd to write zeroes to the whole > disk when a controller gets balky about swapping a failed sector. It isnt the controller that does that, its the drive itself.
From: Jonathan de Boyne Pollard on 15 Feb 2010 05:52
> >> >> When I right-clicked a hard disk in Window$ and hit Format, was it >> the hard disk controller that took over to format a particular sector >> on the disk? Or was it the OS? >> > None of them. The "format" operation under Windows does not format > (create and write) sectors. In proper OSes, what it does is called > filesystem creation. > And elsewhere, and more commonly, it's called a "high-level format", as opposed to a "low-level format". Were M. Toylet to put that phrase into xyr favourite WWW search engine, xe would find lots of information on the subject. |