General :: Repairing The Bad Sectors Using Software?
May 24, 2011Just came up my mind about repairing the bad sectors using software.Does using a software really repair the bad sectors in the hard disk?
View 5 RepliesJust came up my mind about repairing the bad sectors using software.Does using a software really repair the bad sectors in the hard disk?
View 5 RepliesI have Parckard Bell Easynote B.V and i partitioned it in three forms C and D for windows in which D is used for backup E for Debian and i installed xp and debian were just running excellent later i thought of upgrading XP to win 7,after upgrading i had grub issues which i managed to repair but after repairing on the operating system list it still displays windows XP and no windows 7 on the list.i am stuck.
View 4 Replies View RelatedI made a bunch of video files with Thoggen a few years back and now it seems I'm having issues with playback. As the audio and video are intact and VLC, mplayer and xine can all play the files perfectly and ffmpeg can happily reencode the files. I think I need to rebuild the container metadata without reencoding the video or audio streams but I'm not entirely sure exactly how to do this without using avidemux, which won't work for me.
Technical stuff follows:
VLC works but complains
Code:
charles@wintermute:~/Videos/tmp$ vlc broken.ogg
VLC media player 1.0.6 Goldeneye
[0xff94b8] main libvlc: Running vlc with the default interface.
Use 'cvlc' to use vlc without interface.
TagLib: Vorbis::File::read() - Could not find the Vorbis comment header.
[0x126af18] main input error: ES_OUT_RESET_PCR called
[0x1787f18] pulse audio output: No. of Audio Channels: 2
QPainter::begin: Paint device returned engine == 0, type: 1
QPainter::begin: Paint device returned engine == 0, type: 1
MythTV gives me silent video .....
I have a massive ZFS array on my fileserver. Whenever a disk reports bad sectors to smartmon, I order a replacement, and I shelve the failing one.
And by "shelving the failing one", I mean that I give it a low-level format if applicable, or a destructive badblocks run to possible claim spare sectors to replace the bad ones, then use it to dump my DVDs (and lately BluRays) on, so that I can use it with my HTPC and bring it with me when going to my friends to watch movies. It's just a really easy and portable way to watch movies with XBMC. I have the stuff on pressed discs already, so I'm not dependent on their reliance, and the dying drive just gets a hospice life serving as quick-access media storage. Keeping in mind Google's reports that drives are 39x more likely to die within 60 days after their first SMART error, I'm expanding that period by the fact that these drives mostly remain on their shelves and are only plugged into the SATA bay once or twice every year.
I'm just saying this to make clear that I'm not confused about these drives dying, and I'm not looking to elongate their lives ;)
So. Sometimes these drives, after a badblocks run, simply claim fresh sectors from the spare pool, but sometimes there aren't any left, and I face the fact that there are bad sectors in my FS. That's not a problem if you use one of a set of linux filesystems, as mkfs.* often takes a badblocks list as input. But seeing as I sometimes bring a drive or two to my girlfriend's (Mac) or one of my friends (usually Windows), I've decided to use NTFS for these things. Up untill now, when a drive had unrelocatable bad sectors, I've just written data to it, re-read it, and files that were bad were put in a "BAD_SECTOR_FILES" folder on the drive.
Sure, it works, but it would be really nice to be able to just mark those sectors bad instead. It's a lot of hassle the other way around.
So I read some posts, of which most quickly switch subject to the often accurate one of "replace your drive!", and some suggest spinrite, but really, I don't see why I should pay that much money for such a trivial task.
The alternative is to use ext3, but I'd like to hear if someone knows how I can feed badblocks output to mkfs.ntfs, so that the bad blocks aren't used. Or if there are other tools (I could use Windows in a VM) that do the same. I'm confused about chkdsk, it seems the bad sectors thing is FAT only?
Question 1. Does gparted etc. just write to the MBR? Question 2. Is this the only record of the partition table? Question 3. How do i find the sectors that the partitions occupy?
View 2 Replies View RelatedI'm running a Debian homeserver, with a 3-disk (1GB each) raid 5 array using mdadm (the OS is on a separate disk).Now, smartmontools noticed some bad sectors on one of the disks, and I'm not sure what to do next (except for backup of valuable data).I found some articles on how to fix these sectors, but I'm unaware what the result on the whole array will be.
View 4 Replies View RelatedI'm currently using Fedora 12 as seen in the subject, and I'm fairly new to it, but recently I've had a problem with my HDD. The problem is bad sectors and I've read up on how they occur but not many placessearched actually explains how to deal with this. When I start up my laptop (Acer 5610z) I get a SMART error saying "predicted disk failure, please back up data and replace drive." Along those lines, so I got curious and used Disk Analyzer this roughly what it says:
Reallocated Sector Count: Failing Normalized:129
Worst:129
Threshold:140
[code]...
I can't seem to find any programs or applications for linux that will find bad sectors of a usb drive. I have seen plenty for Windows, but I was wondering if there are any for linux.
View 8 Replies View RelatedI have a 230GB hard drive wich I don't know it's name.I have a 207GB windows vista partition and the rest of it is for linux (Ubuntu).Today I decided giving it all space to Ubuntu Linux ,but didn't want to lose all my data from the windows partition.I thought that by deleting all things except the folder with my data and leaving enough space to shrink and make enough room for another partition to put my data folder.The logic is that i could then format that partition wich previously was windows and use it all for ubuntu without losing data.After having ubuntu installed i could copy my data folder to /home and then delete the previous partition and make /home bigger.The problem is that after i freed the space,when using Gparted to shrink it says that the partition has bad sectors or the filesystem has problems and so it can't do some operations.
What could have went wrong?It told me to do chkdisk but as i deleted all the windows files and i can't boot into it anymore.I used the vista dvd to do that.I rebooted 2 times as it says and after that when trying again nothing changed.I tried to use ntfsresize with the --bad-sectors argument and also the -f argument but it's useless.At the end it says it won't do anything until the ntfs filesystem get repaired.Or it says it is too risky to continueIs there any way i could do some superforce command to resize it without losing data?Please don't tell me to put it on an external storage cause i have like 70GB of datas to save...no i don't have an external hardrive
To make a full backup I run a live Knoppix DVD and clone the computer's HDD to an external HDD using the dd command. Is there a possible problem with the source being copied onto bad sectors on the destination disk? If so is there a way to prevent this from happening? A typical dd command I use looks like: dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=4096 conv=notrunc,noerror. Is this the recommended command for cloning to a disk of equal size?
View 1 Replies View RelatedI recently tried Fedora on my laptop (previously Debian; I was bored one day) and gnome-disk-utility (palimpsest) warned me that my hard drive had numerous bad sectors. I re-installed Debian to find that this software was installed before so why had it not warned me?
When I load the disk utility, it says SMART is not available. I've got smartmontools installed, I can run a self-test with smartctl but I don't think this shows bad sectors. I've tried starting smartd on startup but the disk utility never changes from "SMART is not available". It is possible for it to work with this hardware as it works in Fedora on this laptop; any ideas?
I'm wondering if there is a way to remove GRUB from a live CD, then reinstall it?
I have three hard disks. What happened is, for some reason in the installer, it thought sda had the MBR on it. But in reality, sdb has the MBR. So when I rebooted, seeing as how I have installs of windows on sda and sdb, GRUB never appeared, and I got the windows bootloader screen.
During the upgrade of my slackware from 13.0 to 13.1 an electric problem happen on my sony laptop. So the upgrade is fine, disk is fine but no time to run the lilo for configure the new boot. Now impossible to boot. I boot on a backtrack live CD, and can't repair my lilo.Is someone could help me. I use slackware since the 3.2 (kheops in french).
View 3 Replies View Relatedmy ENTIRE hard drive now has user AND group permissions root. I can't start X and are having various permissions issues. although ive been using linux for a long time.
long story long, I did a debian netinst to my netbooks SSD. got everything EXACTLY as I wanted it, was very happy with my first go at debian but of course being a linux dork im always willing to tweak. I installed onto btrfs which I recently learned supports compression which not only saved precious SSD space (only 8GBs) but according to some benchmarks also improved performance. this was a boot option and would only start compressing new files. this, of course, could not be good enough. so I formatted my SD card btrfs, mounted it with compress option + my SSD defaults and copied over all files that weren't a mount (i.e. proc, dev, sys,...) however I forgot to copy permissions. so every file was copied with root:root ownership and I didn't realize this when booting to the SD card to verify things were working as I assumed ( never do this ) that getting to a login terminal was enough. So now I need to fix all permissions and I would really prefer it be without a clean install.
A netinst can take a dec amount of time and I had a lot of tweaking to do since I only used Xorg + i3 tiling wm. there has to be a way to fix this...I started trying to reinstall all the packages but kept running into issued where aptitude wasn't able to reinstall things like bash or perl-base, presumably bc they were in use or had incorrect permissions set
We have a Fedora11 installation that we Ghosted (Norton Ghost) to a bigger Hard Disk because the old one was failing
I know there is an extra step for linux where you fix fstab because it points to all the wrong locations, could someone walk me through this or link me to somewhere that can walk me through it?
Do I need to do this editing from a Fedora 11 Live CD (as its gone missing) or will a Fedora 13 CD do the trick?
I forgot that Python is actually essential to Gnome and wanted to update to 3.1, and didn't realize my mistake until some of Gnome had been removed, then I Ctrl+C'd out. Now I can't even connect to the internet to repair my broken packages. I'm out of town for Mother's Day, but in the car it occured to me that I should have tried my Live CD.
As a side issue, is it alright to install more than one version of Python? I'm guessing so, so long as I keep track of which one I'm calling. I used apt-cdrom to update my sources.list appropriately so I could apt-get from the Live CD, but apt complained about locales. Now sources.list has strangely lost the cdrom line, but I'll put it back when I next boot to repair mode.
repairing the MBR on my raid array. I have three disks, each with three paritions:root (sda1 sdb1 sdc1) 59GB swap (sda2 sdb2 sdc2) 1.12GB grub/boot (sda3 sdb3 sdc3) 298MB I have been able to get this running and it has been working fine for several months. A few days ago, I installed 10.04 to a USB stick but did not disable the hard drives at that point and so the MBR was overwritten. If I leave the USB stick in, it boots fine from that stick. However now I can't get the boot from the raid array to work correctly. I can do the following:Load 10.04 from the Live CD install mdadm recreate the root partition using
Code:
mdadm --assemble /dev/md0 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1
I can mount and view the files on md0 with no problems. It's not corrupted in any way. When I installed, I followed the directions to make each of the grub drives bootable. However I don't know for sure whether grub was installed on each partition separately or if it was installed on the assembled partition only. I have tried using
Code:
sudo grub-install /dev/sda3
and got warnings, something to the effect
Code:
Cannot find a device for /boot/grub
no path or device specified
Auto-detection of a filesystem module failed
specify the module with option '--module' explicitly
I have also been able to get to the grub rescue prompt but my keyboard (wireless USB) is not recognized and so I can't type anything in at that point.
When I hook it up to my Mac the hard drive shows up in Disk Utility but it can't mount it nor fix it. I don't have Diskwarrior (or similar programs) so I was wondering if I could fix it from my Linux boxes (xubuntu). So my question is, is there a program in Linux that could extract the data from the drive or (even better) fix it?
View 1 Replies View RelatedI have Ubuntu 10.10 installed on my computer (no other OS) and it wont boot up. I don't want to lose the files in my documents. I tried accessing them using a live CD and then copying them from the harddrive (home folder then 'richard' then documents then tried to open the folder but I dont have permission to and there seems to be no way of changing this.
The files are definitely on my harddrive but I dont seem to have a way of accessing them!
Is there anyway of either accessing them and copying them to a usb etc or repairing my installation of ubuntu without erasing the files in my documents? Opening in recovery mode etc wont work.
Basically, my Ubuntu 10.10 desktop crashed and now when I try to boot into it I get all sorts of error messages and then I get dropped into a shell - it can't find the device etc. I tried running fsck from the command line but it can't find it. My DVD Drive isn't reading properly so I have no way of running the Recovery software on there.
View 3 Replies View RelatedI have two operating systems on my PC, 1- Fedora 12 2- Windows XP. when I re-install windows xp on PC yesterday, and reboot system, doesn't display grub menu to select a OS!! I tried to repair it with fc12 DVD 32bit, but it doesn't have any option for repairing grub (fc10 DVD had this option!!)
Code:
1. Resure install ...
go to shell and type:
2. chroot /mnt/sysimage
3. grub-install /dev/sda
4. exit
5. exit
and it without any error, said successfully done. when I reboot system and choose fedora from grub menu, fedora doesn't start and in black startup screen said:
Code:
SELinus target ...
take very times... dependence hard disk speed ....
****************************
****************************
what can I do for repairing it?
I am facing some issues with my openSUSE 11.2 installtion. Yesterday i installed win 7 so the grub is now wiped out. I have also taken mbr backup in USB. I tried following things to make things work.[/HTML]
1) Repair using openSUSE DVD booted using DVD then automatic repair but it couldn't find any root partition. After showing error that no root partition found it crashes to a blue screen with advanced configurations from there i was able to use shell but cant see and mount any linux partitions. i tried mounting the root partition it gave the error :"please load module ext4dev before mounting" how can i install grub without losing my present installations.
2) Tried booting with Ubuntu & kubuntu 8.04 live cd .. both gave a error and refused to boot. then tried openSolaris which failed to detect the USB drive so couldnt restore the GRUB to /dev/hda.
After installing the recent kernel update and rebooting my machine I have found a horrible fact, my computer won't boot anymore. It seems my root partition was corrupted, and running fsck on it just sends me through a endless loop of "Ignore Errors {y}:" and "Force overwrite {y}:". I have already tried the use the repair system on the installation DVD but that doesn't do anything, the pop up asking if I want to repair the file system keeps coming up when I click repair.
View 1 Replies View RelatedI'm having difficulty repairing/reformatting a USB drive. I've yet to explore and get me on the right track. I'm sure I'm missing something obvious. I have a generic USB drive, 4GB, currently formatted FAT. I can't save files to it, can't format it using Ubuntu's Disk Utility. Attempts to format using Disk Utility return the following error:
Error creating partition table: helper exited with exit code 1: Error calling fsync(2) on /dev/sdb: Input/output error Yesterday I got fed up and tried to just zero the thing out using a dd command... ran it in verbose, the right stuff returned to screen, still no dice. I can't get it to a point where I can format it either using Disk Utility or mkfs.
Using redhat linux el5, when I had booted I had pbm repairing filesystem. So I run following commands
1. fsck -l
2. fsck
But I cannot solve the pbm. My pbm is I had important folder "backup" in root folder just I want to copy it in pendrive how to do it.
I have a fubar'd Windows 7 install I need to get working on another partition so I can do some development stuff. I use Ubuntu 95% of the time though and so the machine has an option at boot for what OS I want to go into. Does anyone know if I boot up with the Windows disc in and choose the repair option if it will screw up my boot options and I potentially lose my ability to boot into Ubuntu?
View 1 Replies View Relatedi was trying to do some maintenance on the database and i have the following problem when looking at the database with phpmyadmin on the site
Code:
Table Ation Records Type Collation Size Overhead
uc_order_products_pair_vw Browse Structure Search Insert Empty Drop ~01 View --- unknown -
uc_order_products_qty_vw Browse Structure Search Insert Empty Drop ~01 View --- unknown -
uc_order_products_user_vw Browse Structure Search Insert Empty Drop ~01 View --- unknown -
[Code].....
I'm running an Acer Aspire 1830T-3721 dual-booting Windows 7 with Ubuntu 10.10 (Desktop).
Background: So first I dropped my laptop a couple feet while Windows was running. The laptop immediately shut off and then tried to boot. Booting Windows results in an unfortunate "Windows has encountered a problem communicating with a device connected to your computer. The error can be caused by ... faulty hardware ... Status: Oxc00000e9 Info: An unexpected I/O error has occurred." But Ubuntu booted fine, and could access my NTFS files fine, so I was trying to work on the problem from there. I try a few utilities, looking at the partition table, etc without actually applying any changes.
Then I run a fsck on the drive. It loudly warns me that if I continue on a mounted drive, then I'm going to mess things up. In a moment of stupidity I push on, thinking that surely it would ask me for more configuration, or confirmation, before actually starting. The fsck runs for about 1 second before I Ctrl-C it, running some preliminary stuff and then just starting pass 1.
After this, Ubuntu won't boot anymore. Instead, it hangs just after the init-bottom script runs. If I boot with init=/bin/bash, I can get to a shell, and see that my file system is still there, but not sure what else to do.
I've been running off of a SysRescCD LiveCD, from which I've looked at the drive with testdisk. Testdisk reports that "the hard disk seems too small" while showing me the partition table.
I ran a fsck on the Linux partition; it fixed a bunch of things. There has been no apparent effect on the boot behavior.
I can access all my files, back them up, and reinstall Ubuntu, but I'm hoping there's a better solution, perhaps one that will also help me repair my Windows installation (but I'm looking at one problem at a time here).
I have some errors on my drive and I fear it may be faulty. However there are a few things I would like to try before replacing it through the manufacture or buying a new drive of my own seeing as this is a brand new computer.
Here is my computer and drive:
Acer 5251-1513 Laptop
Toshiba MK2565GSX
Running Fedora 13...now
Here is what is going on. Tried several version of Ubuntu 10.4 (studio, 64bit, 32 bit) and was having many errors during startup and having to press F to fix. Then I lost something with Gnome and the GUI would not function, and I did not know how to replace it. Tried a few other distros but could not get them to work (mostly on my part I am sure.) Then after some forum talk, thought it might just be Ubuntu unable to handle my drive. Now on Fedora 13 and a warning comes up every time I startup. "Disk has many bad sectors"
In the disk utility under the SMART Data it has 2 of the following warnings:
5- Reallocated Sector count..with a value of 72 sectors
197 Current Pending Sector count...with a value of 35 sectors
Total Bad Sectors 108.
The next day that went up to 110
I have used Fsck several times through a live CD, but the problem persists. Trying to understand bad blocks and how to write them to a file?
I have an Acer tiny desktop using laptop components and I want to replace its small laptop hdd running Vista with a Kingston SSDNow V Series Boot Drive 30GB and install Ubuntu, since it will support TRIM. I am aware of the current issues on some new hard drives with 512 vs. 4k sector sizes and the necessity to align sectors for those drives. And I know I've seen some posts or discussion of aligning sectors for SSD's.
I'll be doing more searching for info on this, but my previous searches on the 4K sector alignment issue for the new WD hdd's on linux were confusing. Does anyone have definitive information on the necessity of aligning 4k sectors on current Linux kernels, or on whether aligning sectors is necessary for SSD's?