Re: [COMP] How does scandisk keep track of bad blocks

> With the price of large hdd falling, this is an obsolete hardware question
> but here goes:

I bought a 16.8 gig IBM Deskstar (mmmm) for $120, about two months ago (maybe
more?).  If you can afford it, there's nothin like new hardware. :)

>
>
> Am trying to load linux and or win95b onto lowend machines and trying to keep
> the costs down I have acquired several old hard drives on several boards. 2
> of the hdd have bad blocks, one is an old WD caviar 31200 1.2g and one is a
> Maxtor 7200 2g

Bad blocks = free replacement drive.  Is it still under warranty?

> wddiag said the WD has bad blocks and repaired them, I then wrote zeros to

> the disk ( it used to have ezbios on it)

You wiped the bad blocks then.  Bad.


> Scandisk thourogh from windows dosent show me anything so I did scandisk from
> the command prompt before windows loaded. It showed 10 bad blocks that it
> said it marked so the OS wouldnt write to those.

Right.  Writing zeros to the disk (I imagine) wipes out the data that says 'hey,
don't write here.'


> Now that I've formatted and fdisked the drives how would the new OS of my
> choice be made aware of what MS scandisk marked?

When you install Linux, and format the disk, use the option to check for bad
blocks.

> when I formatted the Maxtor drive I saw a message I've never seen before: it
> said something about bad blocks.
> So my question is, how does this process work? does linux have a scandisk
> counterpart?

Not that I know of, but I'll look into it.

> I also recently discovered Norton licenced the original defrag and scandisk
> to M$
> Does Norton offer products for linux/unix?

You're lucky that they don't. :)  Fragmentation is a problem caused by poor
implementation -- run Microsoft OS's, or use FAT16/32 or NTFS, and you'll have
serious fragmentation problems.  Ext2 (Linux's filesystem) doesn't fragment
until you get above 90% capacity, and even then, it's minimal.

Aside from Disk utils, I don't know of anything that Norton writes for Linux.
If there are similar utilities out there, they're usually written by the
independent hacker, and generally of higher quality.

John





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