input/output error on disk(?)

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 12:17:36 -0400,
  Tony Nelson <tonynelson at georgeanelson.com> wrote:
> Sadly, you have not fixed any of the bad blocks by deleting the files.  
> The bad blocks will only be replaced when they are written to.  Now 
> that the files are deleted, you will need to write to all the free 
> space of the drive to write to the defective blocks.  This should do 
> the trick (as root, or from the Rescue CD):

He should be able to get the sector numbers by running long self tests.
On the disks I have own, this only gets you one sector per scan rewrite
cycle. Also note that linux tools such as dd write 8 sectors at a time
and if you try to write less than that, a read will be tried first which
will most likely fail because of the bad sector.