[ale] checking disk sectors

[Jeff Hubbs]

> Can you actually repair the physical surfaces of hard drives with
> Linux or any tools?  Do you just mark the bad sectors and stay
> away from them?

Mark and avoid bad sectors, if you can.  Another possibility would be to
make two partitions around the bad sector (if you can identify which
physical cylinder the bad block is on) and join them back together with
RAID-linear.  

> I guess big drives are cheap nowadays, but I'm kinda cheap too,
> and I also hate to throw away a HD that might be useful somehow.

I'm of the same mind, irrational though it may be.  A few years ago I
connected five or six 20-30MB Ehman external SCSI drives to a Windows NT
server just for kicks - I called it the "Ehmanframe."  Hey, I could make a
100-MB RAID 5 array out of them...

- Jeff
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