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: Man-wai Chang to The Door (24000bps) on 14 Feb 2010 05:36 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 不借貸! 不詐騙! 不援交! 不打交! 不打劫! 不自殺! 請考慮綜援 (CSSA): http://www.swd.gov.hk/tc/index/site_pubsvc/page_socsecu/sub_addressesa
From: Arno on 14 Feb 2010 07:12 In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage "Man-wai Chang to The Door (24000bps)" <toylet.toylet(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? 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. With a long "format" it just adds a verify read of the surface. > 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. The retry is likely the disk. The controller cannot do it. The OS may also do retries, but I think it does not in this case. Is this a WD disk? They are known to take so long on read errors that they get dropped by RAID controllers for unresponsiveness. 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. Arno -- Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email: arno(a)wagner.name GnuPG: ID: 1E25338F FP: 0C30 5782 9D93 F785 E79C 0296 797F 6B50 1E25 338F ---- Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking. -- Dylan Evans
From: Man-wai Chang to The Door (24000bps) on 14 Feb 2010 08:26 > 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).... bad sectors were detected and marked properly.... -- @~@ 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 ^ ^ 21:25:02 up 2 days 5:10 0 users load average: 1.08 1.08 1.08 不借貸! 不詐騙! 不援交! 不打交! 不打劫! 不自殺! 請考慮綜援 (CSSA): http://www.swd.gov.hk/tc/index/site_pubsvc/page_socsecu/sub_addressesa
From: Christian Franke on 14 Feb 2010 10:06 Arno 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. > Some recent disks support the SCT Error Recovery Control (ERC) command specified in ATA-8 ACS. The command allows to read and set the time limits. It is supported by HDAT2 and by recent builds of smartctl. See: http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~greg/projects/erc/ (The patch is included in upstream smartctl since 5.40 r3065). Christian
From: Rod Speed on 14 Feb 2010 13:19
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. |