[Discuss] bad hd super block

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2014-12-18 17:44-0800 John Blomfield wrote:

> On 12/18/2014 03:17 PM, Deryk Barker (Honorary Colleague) wrote:
>> This might be incredibly silly but....if you have several partitions on 
>> that drive shouldn't you be fsck'ing /dev/sdb1 for example, not /dev/sdb? 
>> /dev/sdb doesn't contain a superblock, as it ain't a filesystem - if you 
>> really have more than one partition on the disk.
> Not silly at all just my stupid mistake! I did have a bad superblock which 
> was on one of the 5 partitions on the drive but obviously fsck /dev/sdb was 
> not the way to fix it.
>
> Thanks for all the other suggests guys. I ran fsck, mke2fs and e2fsck etc as 
> suggested but for some reason that escaped me. There were hundreds of bad 
> blocks and some I could not fix. In the end I cleared off the whole drive and 
> am now in the process of rebuilding the data from backup and so far 
> everything seems fine. I checked all the new partitions and they are clean. I 
> also took the opportunity to re-organize my partitioning and boot procedure 
> so all was not completely a waste of time.

Hi John:

Hundreds of bad blocks sounds like you have just reached the end of
life (i.e., no spare blocks left to swap in for bad blocks) for this
drive.  I frankly would be amazed if it is fine from now on given this
track record.  Anyhow, immediately or at the latest at the first sign
of additional trouble, I think your best bet would be to give it up as
a lost cause and buy a new HD (which after all should be quite
inexpensive).

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

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and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
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