Feisty live CD killed HD

[James Takac]

On Wednesday 05 September 2007 00:41:04 Liam Proven wrote:
> On 04/09/07, m_epling <m_epling at comcast.net> wrote:
> >  thats crazy ...you must be a windows FUD person . no way a live cd can
> > destroy a hard rive even during a format
>
> Just a small point of order. A software operation *can* render a hard
> disk permanently useless.
>
> An example:
>
> Errors in track 0 cannot be mapped out in software, as track 0 is
> where the bad-block error map lives.
>
> Imagine a hard disk that has an unnoticed bad block in the partition
> table. Partitions can be read and written OK, but if something
> attempts to change the table, then the block can't be written and
> suddenly the disk fails.
>
> The partitioning operation itself does not itself damage the disk; it
> merely exposes existing damage. However, to the user, repartitioning
> killed the drive.
>
> On modern EIDE drives, the drive itself does transparent bad-block
> remapping below the level that the OS can see. However, this is not
> infallible. Once all the reserve blocks have been used, errors - bad
> blocks - become visible to the OS. So the scenario I describe would
> need the disk to have already exhausted its hot-spare-block capacity.
> That does happen; I have seen it several times.
>
> --
> Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
> Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
> Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884 • Fax: + 44 870-9151419
> AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com • MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com
> Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk • Skype: liamproven • ICQ: 73187508

Hi Guys

To the original poster of the thread. Can you tell us exactly what you did 
during the install, i.e. let us know how you answered the various prompts. 
e.g. did you tell it to use the entire disk or did you tell it to use a 
certain size or percentage of the disk. The more detail you can give us as to 
what you did, the better the chances of us figuring out what went wrong, and 
how to fix it

James