On Fri, 2004-04-30 at 13:54, Guolin Cheng wrote: > Hi, Snip ATA/IDE disks with DSP's have for several years have extra sectors that are used when bad areas are found by the DSP. When found the DSP moves the data to a spare sector and marks the bad sector (that is why you don't see error tables as you did on older drives like RLL ans MFM drives). If you see this it means that; 1) The disk is dying (is smartd running?) (A good chance) 2) There is a possibility of a virus. (Also a good chance since some viruses will mark a sector bad to hide themselves) 3) All the spare sectors are in use. (See 1 above) 4) The system caught an error before the hard drive DSP. (highly unlikely) 5) Bad cable or transfer speed (unlikely) 6) Some other ATAPI/IDE device malfunctioning. (possible) -- jludwig <wralphie@xxxxxxxxxxx>
