Re: Dying disk and filesystem choice.

[Andreas Dilger <adilger@turbolinux.com>]

It was written:
>   To keep it short and sweet, I have a 45Gb IBM drive that
> is slowly dying by getting more bad sectors. I have already
> returned my first one to get the current disk, so would like
> to use the current one for a while before returning it for 
> another disk that will prolly just start dying again.
> 
> I am using reiserfs at the moment, which doesn't really like 
> to work on a dying drive. for example, doing a make fails to
> work even though it is *creating* files on the disk, it fails
> to do so because it hits new bad sectors and doesn't seem to
> remap them. 
> 
> I am wondering what advise on filesystem choice the list as
> and any other options I can use to get the kernel to remap
> bad blocks.

Well reiserfs is probably a very bad choice at this point.  It
does not have any bad blocks support (yet), so as soon as you have
a bad block you are stuck.

You should probably use ext2, along with the badblocks program to
check which blocks in the disk are bad.  It will do a read-write
test, and either your disk will remap the bad blocks, or they will
be detected.

Even so, keep your backups current...

Cheers, Andreas
-- 
Andreas Dilger  \ "If a man ate a pound of pasta and a pound of antipasto,
                 \  would they cancel out, leaving him still hungry?"
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/               -- Dogbert