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Manually reassigning bad blocks on Linux

This is just a note I found on my computer while doing some clean up, and I thought I’d put it here rather than just delete it.
Basically, it’s just some commands + links I found while desperately trying to eliminate a bad block on a hard drive by forcing it to be reassigned. As far as I remember, this didn’t work quite well, and I ended up just requesting the disk to be changed (this happened on a rented dedicated server that I had just ordered).

root@81-7-14-247:~# sg_verify --lba=1909768496 /dev/sda

root@81-7-14-247:~# sg_verify --lba=1909768503 /dev/sda
verify (10): Descriptor format, current; Sense key: Medium Error
Additional sense: Unrecovered read error - auto reallocate failed
Descriptor type: Information
0x0000000071d4c137
medium or hardware error, reported lba=0x71d4c137

root@81-7-14-247:~# sg_reassign --address=0x71d4c130 -v /dev/sda
reassign blocks cdb: 07 00 00 00 00 00
reassign blocks: Fixed format, current; Sense key: Illegal Request
Additional sense: Invalid command operation code
REASSIGN BLOCKS not supported

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-905082-start-0.html

http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/badblockhowto.html

http://sg.danny.cz/sg/sg3_utils.html

http://linux.die.net/man/8/sg_verify
http://linux.die.net/man/8/sg_reassign
http://linux.die.net/man/8/sg_write_long

https://superuser.com/questions/384095/how-to-force-a-remap-of-sectors-reported-in-s-m-a-r-t-c5-current-pending-sector

Posted in Linux, servers.


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