Map out bad sector from MFS partition?

[pwendell]

I have a drive that is giving me an 'Uncorrectable Error' on a single sector. I used pdisk to discover that the sector is located in the first MFS Media region. Is there any way to map this sector as bad within Linux? I used to have 4 bad sectors on this disk, but I performed a low level format and then used Spinrite on it which seemed to fix them. The one sector has crept back. If I have to wipe it once more I'll go ahead and RMA it, but I'd rather not for one sector.

Thank you.

[PlainBill]

Most modern drives have spare sectors that can be mapped in to replace a bad sector. Others disagree, but I prefer to use the manufacturer's low level diagnotic utility for this purpose. I've encountered a green screen of death after running it, which the TiVo recovered from on it's own. All recordings were intact.

PlainBill

[Jamie]

Most modern drives have spare sectors that can be mapped in to replace a bad sector. Others disagree, but I prefer to use the manufacturer's low level diagnotic utility for this purpose. ....I agree.

For what it is worth, as far as I know, MFS doesn't have the notion of a bad block list. ext2 does. With a modern e2fsprogs, You can scan for badblocks when you create a file system (mke2fs -c) , or when you scan it for errors (e2fsck -c). It puts the bad blocks in a bad block inode.

[pwendell]

Thanks guys.

I ran the manufacturers utilities before which found 4 bad sectors that were uncorrectable. I then low-level formatted the drive using the same utility and rechecked it. It passed. I'll probably jsut have to return the drive. Hopefully I can get a good backup and not have to redo everything from scratch.

[Jamie]

Thanks guys.

I ran the manufacturers utilities before which found 4 bad sectors that were uncorrectable. I then low-level formatted the drive using the same utility and rechecked it. It passed. I'll probably jsut have to return the drive. Hopefully I can get a good backup and not have to redo everything from scratch.The disk controller will normally map out a bad block when it is written (but not when it is read). If you know the block #, you might be able to run a 'non-destructive read-write' test with the badblocks program. Looks like tivo has that in /sbin/badblocks, but it appears to be an older version that doesn't include the -n non-destructive read-write mode. You could pull the drive and do it on a PC with a recent linux distribution.