[GLLUG] Ubuntu on damaged hardware...

[Marr]

On Wednesday 12 July 2006 8:39pm, Thomas Hruska wrote:
> I've hand-edited both
> FAT16 and FAT32 partitions before to mark bad sectors to drastically
> extend the life of a hard drive.

I can't imagine why you'd want to do that. I haven't hand-edited a FAT 
filesystem in the last 15 years and wouldn't think of doing so unless there 
was serious corruption that utilities could not find/fix (which was the 
reason I did it the last time I did it!). 

If running 'scandisk'/'Thorough' (or whatever it's called these days -- the 
last Windows version I've used much was W98se) doesn't find and mark the bad 
sector (i.e. you're still seeing HDD errors), it's time (IMHO) to junk that 
HDD! :^)

> However, Linux uses EXT3 and that's a 
> pretty extravagant format with the likelihood of seriously messing up
> (FAT16/FAT32 is far more forgiving).

Not sure what you mean by "extravagant". EXT3 is the journalled version of 
EXT2. I've used it a lot with no data loss whatsoever, although these days, 
my primary partition is ReiserFS, mostly because that's now the default 
Slackware filesystem.

> Any tools out there designed to 
> mark bad sectors/clusters under EXT3 filesystems?

Check 'man e2fsck'. Pay special attention to the '-c' and '-k' options. You 
could also see 'man badblocks' (used by 'e2fsck').

HTH....

Bill Marr