bad blocks, what to do?

[nielchiano]

Hi,

I have a not so old harddrive (60GB), but it's been used A LOT and has some bad blocks.
Is it possible to use that drive? Can I tell mkswap and/or mkreiserfs which blocks are bad (and so tell them not to use them)?

[wippie]

or you make a backup and then if the disk is not too old, goes back to where you bought the disk and require a new one.
some bad blocks usually becomes more bad blocks..

[b0fh_]

Ikes! don't use reiserfs with know bad disks... it will wreck up, since it does not have a way to mark bad blocks (I may be wrong, please correct me if...)

You can risk using ext2/ext3 using the badblocks program (man badblocks) to search for bad sectors and mark them, and to tell ext2 to not use that sectors.

I would not risk putting swap in such a bad disk either... swap corruption is an ugly thing.

cheers.
_________________
"Contrary to popular belief, UNIX is user-friendly. It only happens to be picky on its friends."

[nielchiano]