[ubuntu-uk] mbr

[Andy Smith]

Hi Nick,

On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 08:00:10PM +0000, thegeeksquadron at ymail.com wrote:
> Just curious to know this, as I don't format disks too often, but does formatting a HD rid it of any bad sectors? I assume not, but I'm a tad perplexed!

Not as such. Also it depends what you mean by "format". By "format",
most people mean just creating a partition table. This doesn't write
to the whole disk, so can't actually do anything to (most of) the
disk.

If you try to write a bad sector on a modern disk then it will
usually remap that sector to one from its pool of spare sectors.
That has the appearance of "fixing" the sector. It's normal for this
to happen very rarely over the whole life of the drive.

When there is serious damage to the mechanism of the drive, the
errors can come in a flood and deplete all the spare sectors
quickly, which is why it's important to replace a drive when the
remapped sectors count keeps going up.

Cheers,
Andy

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