[wellylug] DD no go

[David Antliff]

On Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 10:45 PM, David Chord <gnome at gnome.co.nz> wrote:
>  (I don't know how to get a check done on un-allocated space, which is why I
>  format, in case anyone wants to ask...)

Not a bad idea - however creating/checking a filesystem such as ext2
does not test for bad blocks unless you use 'mke2fs -c -c /dev/sdb1'
so you could try that.

You can also tell if a disk is bad by trying to dd some data to it and
noticing that it fails........!

I think you have a bad backup disk.

Modern disk controllers (physically on the disk itself) are supposed
to detect bad sectors and transparently (and silently) hide them away
and supply 'spare' sectors from a special pool. This means if you
start to experience visible 'bad sector' problems then the disk has
already run out of spare sectors and is very sick indeed.

Just my observation due to my own frustrations recently - I'm finding
modern consumer-grade hard disk drives increasingly unreliable.
Backups are becoming more, not less, important.

-- 
David.