[ale] Bad Disk Blocks

[John M. Mills]

Funny you should say that!  I am just now struggling with that on a _new_
Seagate 1.2 GBy disk.  Unfortunately it is a destructive operation:

0. back up any salvageable contents of the partition.
1. umount the bad actor.
2. run 'badblocks -o <bad_block_file>' on the partition.  I would do this
   without the '-w' switch to confirm bad blocks, then might repeat _with_
   '-w' to confirm -- NOTE: '-w' will _TRASH_ your disk's contents!
3. run 'mke2fs -l <bad_block_file>' on the partition, thereby trashing its
   contents if you didn't use the '-w' switch, above.
4. recover from your backup and replace any files which had the misfortune to
   lie in bad blocks.

If anyone can suggest a gentler, kinder solution, I would be very happy
to learn of it.  One of the partitions in question in my system is '/' :-(

Regards --jmm--

John M. Mills, Senior Research Engineer   --   john.m.mills at gtri.gatech.edu
   Georgia Tech Research Institute, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA 30332-0834
        Phone contacts: 404.894.0151 (voice), 404.894.6285 (FAX)
           "Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and Simulations"