Hard disk sad?

[Basil Chupin]

Michael Still wrote:

>Hey,
>
>with both 2.5 and 2.4.18, I get error messages along the lines of:
>
>hda: dma_intr: error=0x40 {UncorrectableError}, LBAsect = 17199206, sector
>= 17199199
>
>My googling indicates this is probably a bad block on my hard disk. My
>questions therefore are:
>
> - is this a sign of a disk on the way out?
> - is there any way to correct this apart from a low level format of the
>disk?
> - 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?)
> - am I cursed?
>
>Yours in disk painedness,
>Mikal
>
>  
>
There has been a bit of discussion about this in the SuSE and reiserfs 
group mail forums which, I have to admit, I haven't been following 
closely. I have the same problem with my 80Gb Seagate since I bought it 
a few months ago and the hassle seems to lie with the kernel and/or 
reiserfs not correctly interpreting what the BIOS is showing. The drive 
(and drives of others involved in the conversations in SuSE, eg) works 
perfectly under Windows so I at least am not worried and ignore the 
above error message and have had no problems with data integrity under SuSE.

Cheers.

-- 
A Power so great that it can only be used for Good or Evil.