[GLLUG] Ubuntu on damaged hardware...

[STeve Andre']

   It's really foolish to try and used  damaged hardware for anything
these days.  Having to edit the FAT is a sure sign that the disk is at
a stage where its garbage.  I've only done that to fix things long 
enough to get data off a disk, and then *poof* into the dumpster
it goes.

   Older hardware which can actually do something is *cheap*
these days.  Last time I looked, MSU Salvage had 500MHz Dell's
with 128M ram and a 10 or 20G disk for $55.  Add more memory
to it and you have a machine which can run X/KDE reasonably
well.

   I'm not familiar with ext3 filesystems, but there are enough of
them out there that I think I'd have heard about horrid problems
with it if they were bad.

   Don't use hardware that you don't trust.  It's simply not worth it.

--STeve Andre'

On Thursday 13 July 2006 15:36, Marr wrote:
> 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
> _______________________________________________
> linux-user mailing list
> linux-user at egr.msu.edu
> http://mailman.egr.msu.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-user