Marking bad sectors

[Tommy Trussell]

On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 1:54 PM, Jim Byrnes <jf_byrnes at comcast.net> wrote:
> I have a netbook with  a Crucial 64GB SSD in it.  There are some bad
> blocks in the first GB of the drive.  Right now that is freespace. What
> can I use to get them marked as bad?
>
> Having the freespace at the front or a least freespace with bad blocks
> in it seems to be preventing me from install Ubuntu 9.10 on it
>
> Thanks,  Jim


You have probably been hit by this real nasty bug that makes the SSD
look bad (and in fact the blocks act bad until you "zero" them out).
But you can recover from it.

see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libatasmart/+bug/445852?comments=all

There's a workaround in the description, but if you think you are
affected by the bug, a more stable workaround is in comment 147 (or
look at 160 if you find the wording of 147 confusing).

We hope this will be fixed more properly in time for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid.