How to handle a broken harddrive

[janlaur]

Hi
I have a external 250G usb harddrive, connected using USB2.
It's a few years old, and it's become 'a little broken', which means that once a process touches certain files it breaks down.

By break down, I mean that the process hangs forever, and cannot be killed in any way i know (kill -9 dosn't work). The same goes for every other process that in any way access the mount.
That means that i cannot quit X if some X-process accessed the mount, i cant shutdown and so on.
So whenever my drive breaks down, my only sollution now i to pull the plug.

I am using ext3, with a 2.6.10 kernel.

The perfect sollution for me, would be that whenever the kernel cannot read something, the reading software gets an error, and perhaps breaks down if it cant handle it. I just don't like having un-killable processes.

Another sollution could be to have a tool detect defects, reserve the defect space with a file, and then do a chmod 000 on it. (I wouldn't know how to do that).
And i know the final sollution is to buy a new one, just dont like throwing something out that works 99%. And i dont like that windows actually does a perfect job here, when linux dosn't
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Det var mig der omsmeltede guldhornene

[angoraspruce]

If you get an unkillable process, find the parent of that process and kill that. Do a 'man ps' and it'll explain all about this and how to deal with it.

As to Windows dealing better with a broken HDD, that's just Windows covering up what Linux/Unix lets you know about NOW. Believe me, when a drive starts to go bad, you want to know about it immediately, and then get rid of the thing even faster than immediately!

[GungHo]

do yourself a favour and buy a new one

If you intend to format it with reiser, you can work around defect sectors, see here http://www.namesys.com/bad-block-handling.html

But there is also the recommendation to buy a new one.

Good luck