Hi,
past days, i had several warnings of my backup, it coudln't read some sectors. Is my harddisc slowly dieing or is this another issue? Is there a tool within linux, where i can mark some sectors as defective?
I'd toss the disk. Marking sectors as bad might sound tempting. However, in my experience when you start getting bad sectors, their number simply keeps growing exponentially.
Usually what happens inside disk is that you got head crash which damaged the surface of disk, and small particle (or several of them) got stripped off it. This can happen because of vibrations, or improper disk shutdown (for example, heads were not parked properly for whatever reason). Disks are designed with this in mind, however like with everyting, some designs are better than others, and some manufacturing facilities are implementing designes better than others (plus manufacturers are limited with final disk price and profit margins)...
Since plates are rotating at high speed, this particle(s) will fly around all over the inside of the disk. Because of this, those particles are sometimes also called sattelites (rotation of disk is making circular airflow, and this particles are light enough to rotate with that airflow, like sattelites). From time to time they will cause more damage and occasionally strip more particles from the surface of the disk. Especially if it zips between head and plate, the particle can be pushed down to disk surface and may scratch it, plus it can couse head vibrations that will lead to another head crash. What you will observer is that your disk is getting more and more bad sectors, and their number is exponentially growing.
-- Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic@xxxxxx> Pollard Banknote Limited Systems Administrator 1499 Buffalo Place Tel: (204) 474-2323 ext 276 Winnipeg, MB R3T 1L7
