On 06/09/06, Tony Nelson <tonynelson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Writing to the bad sector will remap it (on modern hard drives, last 5 or 8 years). Just use dd to write to the affected area or the whole drive. After that, the block will no longer be "bad". Doing a low-level format of the drive will generally cause the drive to skip over all bad sectors and build a new "spare sectors" area. Modern drives can be configured to continuously test themselves via SMART, with the --offlineauto option to smartctl. SMART can also tell you if the drive appears healthy. --
Thanks Tony, that cleared a lot about smarttools also a lot. I always used to wonder about how smarttools can be used to fix a hdd bad sector. Now I learned from your mail that just writing to the bad area of the disk will fix it because disks are intelligent enough these days. smarttools is used for just diagnosis purposes. Also I am goinng to put smartctl --smart=on --offlineauto=on --saveauto=on /dev/hda in my /etc/rc.local. Thanks again. Vijay
