Re: Bad Sectors on a SATA Drive

Lawrence Houston wrote:
> Question 1: RHEL3 does NOT appear to have an Option to complete a Scan 
> for
>             Bad Blocks at Installation Time (which I have seen as an
>             Option for other Linux Distributions)...  Is that a way of
>             forcing RHEL3 to scan for Bad Blocks at Installation Time?
Hmm.   How long do you want the installation to take?   It can take 
hours to scan big disks for bad sectors and there's no guarantee that 
it'll find anything.   Recently I had a disk start reporting errors but 
badblocks was quite happy with it.  "smartctl" on the other hand is very 
scathing of the quality of the disk :-)   I can't say I'm a large-scale 
sysadmin (I'm the hapless engineer that gets to look after these boxes, 
I was once, twenty-odd years ago, paid to do sysadmin and I can't seem 
to shake it, but SMART does seem to be a much better way to go than 
scanning a disk and hoping it'll show up errors.   I particularly like 
the way I get a mail message when a disk is about to go irretrievably bad.

> Question 2: Is there any way to have RHEL3 complete a Surface Scan while
>             it is still running in the Networked Multi-User Mode (I am
>             located 100 Miles away)?  I ask since dropping into Single
>             User Mode and Remounting in Read-ONLY Mode to run Utilities
>             from the Command-Line on the Console is NOT something the 
> less
>             experienced computer users are willing to do on their own!
You can run badblocks read-only without bringing the system down -- I 
did it this morning on a disk I was suspicious of that doesn't support 
SMART.   Well, the disk does, but the USB enclosure doesn't so I'm 
planning to put it in a machine and see what smartctl has to say.   
It'll probably say it's not well :-(

jch

--
Taroon-list mailing list
[email protected]
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/taroon-list