Bad sector's ???

[Jordon Bedwell]

On 7/21/10 6:53 AM, Tom H wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 7:37 AM, Gilles Gravier<ggravier at fsfe.org>  wrote:
>> On 21/07/2010 13:27, Larry Shields wrote:
>>>
>>> I was just using the program Disk Utility, and went through each on of my
>>> hard drives, it shows
>>> that my 250gb drive has a few bad sector's on it...
>>
>>> My question is there a way to correct this, without loosing any data...???
>>
>> When you start having bad sectors, it's time to change the disk. Most modern
>> disks will remap data from bad sectors (if they can still read it) to good
>> sectors. But you should get a new disk, copy all of the old disk to the new
>> one and scrap the old one.
>
> If this is on an ext2/ext3/ext4 filesystem, you can use fsck.ext2's
> "-c" option to find bad blocks and add them to the bad block inode. It
> would be a temporary fix though; a disk replacement is required.
>

It's only time to replace a drive if you test it a week or two later and 
discover that you have more bad sectors than before, this means that you 
have semi-rapid failure going on. Otherwise one or two bad sectors isn't 
anything to worry about especially if your drive is S.M.A.R.T aware and 
it would be a waste of money for a normal consumer to replace a 
non-failing drive because of a few bad sectors.  That's the equivalent 
of replacing your NIC card because you drop a few packets.