Re: Linux Hard Drive Question

From: Walter Mautner (leafnews.20.eatallspam_at_spamgourmet.com)
Date: 02/21/05

  • Next message: Mark Healey: "Trying to come up with a piping sequence" 
    Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 08:05:35 +0100

    amerar@iwc.net wrote:

    >
    >
    > Hi All,
    >
    > I am running Red Hat 9.0. I have 2 250GB drives in my box. I use
    > Ghost 8.0 to image the drive each week to back it up. So, onec drive
    > is actually the backup drive only....
    >
    That's linux. For your purpose, you would not need ghost. You could even
    setup a "live" mirroring with software raid-1 making it easy to recover
    from a bad disk. Though a "offline mirror" has some advantages too.
    Read "man dd" as a really simple example.

    > At any rate, a few weeks ago I tried imaging the drive and I received
    > some "Read Sector Error" on a specific directory. Ghost asks me if I
    > want to output the error to A:GHOSTERR.TXT. when I try and do that, I
    > receive the error "Cannot Open GHOSTERR.TXT".
    >
    Well, "A:" ... you would have to insert a floppy then :).
    There are some switches to ghost which let it resume after unreadable
    sectors. Call ghost from a commandline, with /? or --help or whatever gives
    you an answer.
     
    > I am wondering if I have a bad spot on my disk. And if so, is Linux
    > like Windows where it can mark a spot bad and just not use it? Or, do
    > I have to throw the entire drive away just because I have one bad
    > block?
    >
    Recent (for sure your 250G) drives already have some part of the disk
    reserved for "spare sectors" to substitute bad ones. That redirection is
    transparent to the OS, unless all spare sectors are already used up - but
    at that time the drive probably already has failed completely. Such a
    redirection, however, is only possible when the controller discovers
    difficulty to _write_ to a distinct sector.
    Sectors you never write to, just read, may become "weak" over time. You
    should, from time to time, swap the work with the image disk. 

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  • Next message: Mark Healey: "Trying to come up with a piping sequence"

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