Re: Feisty live CD killed HD

NoOp wrote:


I was given an old Windows ME computer w/20G AT Fireball hard drive. The
computer seemed to be working well with ME (as far as one can say 'work
well' w/ME). I didn't put it through it's paces in Windows, but
immediately set to installing Ubuntu 7.04 via the alternate CD.
Somewhere in the process the drive experience read/write errors. Most
likely the drive was bad to begin with and Windows ME was hiding the
errors. Reformating, dd, test disk etc., failed to fix the drive and it
is now in my 'beat with a hammer' pile. Could very well be the same case
with the OP; the drive might have been failing all along & installing
Ubuntu just brought out the errors in the drive.



Modern hard drives should map out bad sectors and hide them from the OS.
If there are too many, however, some bad sectors will become OS
visible. Dos FAT filesystems keep their own bad sector map and will
route around them. Linux filesystems, however, do not do this.

As a rule, by the time there are enough bad sectors in current hard
drives that they become visible to the software, the drive is junk. But
it is possible to have a drive that will work fine with Windows (with a
chunk of bad sectors identified by Scandisk) that will cause Linux to
puke all over itself with Read/write errors.

I'm not sure off the top of my head if NTFS also re-maps bad sectors,
but I believe it does.


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