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From: Al on 10 Oct 2009 03:55 Hi Folks, I have been getting into the world of Linux, partly because it has some quite good tools for dealing with DR. I have been slowly find ways to do things that I used to do in Windows in Linux. One of these is the surface test of a hard disk. In WIndows I used to use Partition Table Doctor, which is a farily generic windows based surface tester among other things. The other day I used badblock on a drive that Partition table doctor had told me had a bad sector, but badblocks failed to find it. This has got me puzzled. Anyone able to shed any light on why this might be? Admittadly the drive only had 1 bad block, but shouldnt the results be the same? Cheers in advance, -Al
From: DenverD on 10 Oct 2009 07:21 Al wrote: > Hi Folks, > > I have been getting into the world of Linux, partly because it has > some quite good tools for dealing with DR. i wonder what DR is and how it relates to your posted problem, but i can't figure it out from here: http://www.acronymfinder.com/DR.html and, i wonder how many key strokes you saved by not typing it out.. and, since i've never used nor seen "Partition Table Doctor" i wonder what forensic tools it uses it determine a sector is bad (how bad?) [i tried to learn what it does at http://www.ptdd.com/surfacetest.htm, but couldn't] and i wonder if a Partition Table Doctor's "sector" is the same as a badblock's "block".. and, i wonder if you correctly specified the block size when running badblock [If you set it too low, however, for a non-destructive-write-mode test, then it's possble for questionable blocks on an unreliable hard drive to be hidden by the effects of the hard disk track buffer. cite: http://linux.about.com/library/cmd/blcmdl8_badblocks.htm] with all that said, i also wonder which got it wrong Partition Table Doctor or badblock...and, if the wrong result was due to operator error or the intrinsic 'bestness' of one program over the other.. finally, if your hard drive is relatively modern you might find monitoring by the S.M.A.R.T. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.> daemon (look for "Smartmontools" for your flavor of linux) isn't more useful to you (i mean, do you really care if you have one bad block or 10,000 when you have billion still good? what you really care about is is the disk trustworthy, or not).. if your distro doesn't have it handy, you can get the source from http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki/TocDoc as always, ymmv. -- DenverD (Linux Counter 282315) via Thunderbird 2.0.0.23 (20090817), KDE 3.5.7 "release 72-11", openSUSE Linux 10.3, 2.6.22.19-0.4-default #1 SMP i686 athlon
From: Chris Davies on 10 Oct 2009 09:17 DenverD <spam.trap(a)somewhere.dk> wrote: > i wonder what DR is and how it relates to your posted problem, but i > can't figure it out from here: http://www.acronymfinder.com/DR.html Disaster Recovery Chris
From: DenverD on 10 Oct 2009 11:17 > Disaster Recovery thanks!! of course i should have figured that out.. since Winders folks spend a lot of time doing that, and thinking about it, and talking/writing about it...i can see how they might have 'DR' as a well worn and widely recognized acronym.......heh. -- DenverD (Linux Counter 282315) via Thunderbird 2.0.0.23 (20090817), KDE 3.5.7 "release 72-11", openSUSE Linux 10.3, 2.6.22.19-0.4-default #1 SMP i686 athlon
From: Bill Marcum on 10 Oct 2009 12:36
["Followup-To:" header set to comp.os.linux.misc.] On 2009-10-10, Al <bigal.nz(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Hi Folks, > > I have been getting into the world of Linux, partly because it has > some quite good tools for dealing with DR. I have been slowly find > ways to do things that I used to do in Windows in Linux. > > One of these is the surface test of a hard disk. In WIndows I used to > use Partition Table Doctor, which is a farily generic windows based > surface tester among other things. > > The other day I used badblock on a drive that Partition table doctor > had told me had a bad sector, but badblocks failed to find it. > > This has got me puzzled. Anyone able to shed any light on why this > might be? > > Admittadly the drive only had 1 bad block, but shouldnt the results be > the same? > I wonder if you were running badblocks on the whole drive (/dev/sda) or on a partition (dev/sda1)? |