On Fri, 2003-10-03 at 16:37, Scott S wrote: > This is what I was afraid of! The drive is a pretty new WD 160GB. I guess > it is time for me to check out their warranty. It can't be more than a > month old. Check out their website and see if there are any utilities for checking the health of the drive. You can also change certain device settings. Although, the number of things you can do on an IDE drive is probably limited. I've only ever run those utilities on SCSI/FibreChannel disks.. > Is there a utility like e2fsck that might help? Something to inspect the > drive or the data? I was going to unmount the drive and run e2fsck, but was > not sure if this would help. IDE drives have had the capability to automatically handle bad blocks for a long time. This is generally a transparent process, but drives sometimes tell the operating system that something is going on. In fact, this feature can be turned off on some drives, but I think that's mostly only a tweak used on SCSI/FC RAID arrays.. Anyway, the point is that if your drive is complaining a lot about bad blocks, that usually means that it has run out of space to remap bad blocks into. A scan for bad blocks will help, but that is not a good option for the long term, since the drive will continue to get bad blocks from time to time. You can run e2fsck with the `-c' option to have it do a bad block scan (or maybe `-c -c' -- the documentation isn't too clear on what might be destructive and what is not). Unfortunately, that test will probably take an hour or so.. -- _ _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ ___ _ _ __ MS-DOS: celebrating over / \/ \(_)| ' // ._\ / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__ twenty years of \_||_/|_||_|_\\___/ \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __) obsolescence [ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ] -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20031003/0a5ba666/attachment.pgp