disk problems or false alarm??

jludwig wralphie at comcast.net
Fri Apr 30 18:24:38 UTC 2004


On Fri, 2004-04-30 at 13:54, Guolin Cheng wrote:
> Hi, 
Snip 

ATA/IDE disks with DSP's have for several years have extra sectors that
are used when bad areas are found by the DSP. When found the DSP moves
the data to a spare sector and marks the bad sector (that is why you
don't see error tables as you did on older drives like RLL ans MFM
drives). If you see this it means that;
1) The disk is dying (is smartd running?) (A good chance)
2) There is a possibility of a virus. (Also a good chance since some
viruses will mark a sector bad to hide themselves)
3) All the spare sectors are in use. (See 1 above)
4) The system caught an error before the hard drive DSP. (highly
unlikely)
5) Bad cable or transfer speed (unlikely)
6) Some other ATAPI/IDE device malfunctioning. (possible)
 -- 
jludwig <wralphie at comcast.net>






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