[vox-tech] failing hard drive...

[Jonathan Stickel]

Mark K. Kim wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 08, 2006 at 12:49:56PM -0800, Alex Mandel wrote:
>> Henry House wrote:
>>> P? 2006-12-08, skrev Rod Roark:
>>>> On Friday 08 December 2006 11:52, Jonathan Stickel wrote:
>>>> ...
>>>>> So I must have bad sectors somewhere in the physical region of the first 
>>>>> partition.  Will this problem get worse and propagate to my other 
>>>>> partitions?
>>>> Um, yeah.  Back up anything you care about *immediately* and get a
>>>> replacement drive ASAP.
>>>>
>>>> Most currently manufactured drives are quite good.  I've had good luck
>>>> reliability-wise with Seagate.
> [snip]
>>> heard from Ryan Castelluci that Seagates drives are the best bet for
>>> reliability.
>>>
>>>
>> I agree(Seagate) from experience and the fact that they have 5 year 
>> warranties instead of the standard 3.
> 
> I fourth (or is it fifth?) the Seagate recommendation.  Had problems in
> the past with Western Digital, Maxtor, IBM... haven't had problems with
> Seagate [so far.]
> 
> To answer Jonathan's question: Yes, the problem will likely get worse
> and propagate to other partitions, and it's not likely to be fixable
> with any software.  Newer hard drives use software to map bad sectors of
> the hard drives to the spare sectors normally inaccessible to the OS.
> The hard drive automatically moves sectors it identifies to be bad (via
> checksum) to the spare sectors and updates its bad-sector-to-spare-sector
> map.  The Maxtor software complaining of a "failing" drive, combined
> with Windows no longer booting, is probably the indication that there
> are no more spare sectors.
> 
> -Mark
> 

Thanks to everyone for their helpful comments.  We had an external drive
(Western Digital) laying around unused; I took it apart and installed
the internal drive hiding inside.  I was able to transfer all of Linux
and all of my data without trouble.

Regards,
Jonathan