On Fri, 9 Jan 2004, Evan Prodromou wrote:
Gotta replace the disk. Modern hard disks mark bad sectors internally, and remaps requests to "spare" sectors. Only when a disk runs out of spare sectors will it report any sectors as "bad".
Only for WRITES. Read remapping is almost always disabled -- otherwise, you'll never know the disk is failing or have a chance to repair damaged data. If the sector is readable without error, it's not an error and thus never would be remapped. (See Also: The Chicken and the Egg.)
So, if you're getting bad sector errors, this means the disk has seriously degraded, and it's time to replace it.
I doubt it. I'd replace it as soon as possible, but a full surface scan (e2fsck -c -c) will force those sectors to be remapped. Of course, one could also low-level format the drive and keep on truckin', but that'll destory all the data on the drive and take like 3 hours.
(When the disk is out of spare space, it'll return a different error. And most drives have 2 spare sectors per physical track which amounts to a lot of space.)
--Ricky