On 12/22/2010 11:01 AM Meat Plow spake thus:
Ah, Meat Head shows his good manners again ...
-- Comment on quaint Usenet customs, from Usenet: To me, the *plonk...* reminds me of the old man at the public hearing who stands to make his point, then removes his hearing aid as a sign that he is not going to hear any rebuttals.
The Revenge Dweeb chimes in right on cue. I never claimed to have good manners you simpering f****it. Don't like what I post, don't read it.
-- Live Fast, Die Young and Leave a Pretty Corpse
On Tue, 21 Dec 2010 11:39:01 -0700, D Yuniskis put finger to keyboard and composed:
The drive will wait for a Write command from the host (ie the OS) before it processes a "pending" sector. When a write command is issued, the drive retests the pending sector and returns it to service if good, or reallocates the LBA to a spare sector if bad.
If CHKDSK finds a bad sector, then it takes it out of service and adds it to the $BADCLUS metafile in the case of NTFS, or marks it as bad in the File Allocation Table in the case of FAT16 or FAT32. Thereafter the sector is never accessed again until the next time the drive is formatted. In fact my own Seagate drive had 1 pending sector for its entire life because Windows 98's Scandisk had marked it as bad.
In short, the list of bad clusters maintained by the OS, and the lists of grown and factory defects (G-list and P-list) maintained by the drive, are essentially unrelated. In fact, once a sector has made it into into the G-list, it becomes invisible to the OS. All that the OS sees is an LBA (Logical Block Address), not a physical sector. Remapping or reallocation is the process by which the drive transparently takes a sector from a pool of spares and assigns it to a particular unreadable LBA. The host is never aware that this has happened.
- Franc Zabkar
-- Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.
On Mon, 20 Dec 2010 18:47:49 -0700, D Yuniskis put finger to keyboard and composed:
Use a comprehensive SMART diagnostic tool. Look for reallocated, pending, or uncorrectable sectors.
HD Sentinel (DOS / Windows / Linux):
HDDScan for Windows:
See this article for SMART info:
MHDD can also display the SMART data.
A "low level format" on modern drives merely writes zeros to each sector. It doesn't actually perform a real LLF. After zeroing the drive, any "pending" sectors will be transparently retested and reallocated with spares, if necessary.
- Franc Zabkar
-- Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.
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