[ubuntu-uk] mbr

[Liam Proven]

On 28 January 2012 20:29, Andy Smith <andy at bitfolk.com> wrote:
> 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.

Hmm. I've not knowingly met that usage, but I will remember that as a warning!

> 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.

Yep, WHS.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884