[wellylug] DD no go

Jethro Carr jethro.carr at jethrocarr.com
Sun Apr 6 01:21:38 NZDT 2008


On Sun, 2008-04-06 at 00:13 +1200, David Antliff wrote:
> 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.

If you check the kernel log, you will be able to see if there any I/O
errors whilst reading/writing to the disk.

On a Redhat-style distribution /var/log/messages is the log file you
want.


> 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.

I would say that backups are *always* extremely important regardless of
how reliable the underlying media is. :-)

I tend to use Seagate drives and never have any issues with them. Maxtor
seem to be a bit more unreliable to me (although this is anecdotal and
not at all a reliable study).

Fortunately when a disk does die, there's a nice little feature called
RAID. :-D



-- 
Jethro Carr

www.jethrocarr.com
www.jethrocarr.com/index.php?cms=blog

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