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On 14/07/12 13:00, George Parker wrote: > > I have a 500 Gb hard drive, not very old, that has a few bad blocks > that are causing me grief. As Neil says the badblocks documentation says what to do. More crucially it also tells you that you probably don't want to do it. It may not be "just a few bad blocks", since a few bad blocks are handled by the disk drive when it is first used. It is probably a few blocks that have deteriorated since you wrote data to do. Or more bad blocks than the automatic disk sparing has reserved. The "dd" trick is that the disk drive will automatically swap out badblocks when it encounters them, so writing to all the blocks typically forces the drive to swap out any badblocks it encounters on writing. So yes the blocks are still on disk, but the disk firmware will know not to use them. Basically if you encounter bad blocks in normal operation of a disk toss it, or use it for something where the data doesn't matter (caching, or similar - but appreciate bad reads can cause the OS to crash). If it is reasonably new just return it to vendor under warranty. They likely have a protocol to follow, usually the manufacturer handles it although the law says it is the vendors responsibility to resolve it. Simon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq