[pjkim]

I have two hard drives on my computer and my slave drive has developed some bad sectors. The disk makes repeated searching noises when I access a certain file and sometimes reads it OK and othertimes dies trying. I have tried running Disk Util under OS9 and it returns with errors. When I fsck the drive, it is OK.

Is there a unix utility that will search the drive and lock out bad sectors?

I am not inclined to drop $100 on a OS9 or OSX util when the price of a new drive is not much more than the price of the software.

[Groovy]

The best way is to move all your data off the drive then use the drive setup app
to low level format the drive.

make sure low level option is turned on as well as zero all data
that will do a hardware mapping out of sectors.

the next way is norton apps and the like
they create sorta fake files in the directory structure. you never see the files
but the OS file system does and never tries to write to the bad sectors.

if you use norton edit you can even go in and see what norton does
as it turns on the in use sector bits. IIRC correctly each bit turns on or
off a whole sector which is whatever size you used when you set up
the disk. mine 16K which makes the file system much faster than using the default
of 4K (the down side is if you have lots of little files they take up more space
since each is now 16K even if only 1K of data it really there)
now that i think about I think the default size is based on the drive/partition size.just over ride it.


hope that helped and good luck