[ale] [Fwd: Help save my hard drive!!]

[Steven Rice]

Just some options:

1) Replace the hard drive.  tar ball up each dir in / (one for each one)
and then upload the tarball to some other server, replace drive, boot
from a floppy, cp tarball, un-tar, do a few other things, reboot to the
new drive.. I want ext3...  NOW!!

2) just trash the drive, make a back up of the filesystem, make a
parition on top of the bad sectors, install the latest version of your
favorite distro and use your current /home and /etc config files.  Why
do you want to do this?  'cuase bad sectors tend to grow.  

3) Or just boot from a floppy and run 'e2fsck' on the defected parition
which should mark them bad and drop a trash file with 000 permissions on
top and around the bad sectors.

Of course your /home, /etc, /usr, /usr/local, /var should be on a
parition by them self and not in one "huge" /.  It's damn cool to have
one drive for each!!  2 gigs for /home, 250m for /etc, 520m for /var,
7g's for /usr, a gig for /, then your 1/4 tb raid mount on /ftp.


> I've got a laptop running RedHat 5.1 that's getting ide resets when
> reading a particular file. I'm pretty positive its a bad spot on the
> drive as everything's working fine as long as I don't access that file
> (or a file written to its place). Rebooting and everything else is
> cool.
> 
> Now... what utilities are there that can check an ide hard drive and
> mark blocks as bad so it won't try to access them again? Appreciate 
> any help!
=P
> 
>         thanx & later,
> 
>                 Ben Scherrey