Hard disk sad?

[jepri at webone.com.au]

> - is this a sign of a disk on the way out?
If it's the same block every time, then probably yes.

> - is there any way to correct this apart from a low level format of the
>disk?

As I understand it, it is no longer possible to low level format a hard disk.
 But I'm probably misinformed.


> - is there a linuxy way of doing such a format, or should I download the
>IBM thingie to do it (I know that some distro installs prompt for "check
>for bad blocks", are we talking about the same thing here?)

The bad blocks scan will help you when formatting the drive, but in my experience
bad blocks tend to spread.  The EVMS project had a rather cool feature: a "reserve
cache" of blocks.  When one block failed another was transparently rotated in
from the cache.  It still won't recover the file that had data in that block
though.

Is this your laptop?  Laptop drives are pretty cheap thesedays, and it's not
too hard to install, if you don't mind voiding your  warranty.


> - am I cursed?
>
>Yours in disk painedness,
>Mikal
>
>-- 
>
>Michael Still (mikal at stillhq.com) | Stage 1: Steal underpants
>http://www.stillhq.com            | Stage 2: ????
>UTC + 11                          | Stage 3: Profit
>
>