Repairing bad sectors? - PC-BSD Forums

martiancrawler · #1 08-11-2009, 02:01 AM

I am having problems with bad sectors that makes start up take 15 minutes :cry: . The same bad sectors show up each time on start up and upon using fack -y. Is there any way to mark these sectors, if they can't be repaired so that they don't get scanned each time? I get "unexpected soft update inconsistency" errors at start up, but all programs run well. What can I do, other than buy a new hard drive? :idea: Thanks

Cobalt · #2 08-11-2009, 06:25 AM

Every time? Are you sure your disks are being unmounted properly? I've been looking for disk utilities for FreeBSD/PC-BSD, but I haven't found much. I guess you could use a Puppy Linux live CD and use gparted to repair your drive... Unless anyone else knows of some nice utilities.

martiancrawler · #3 08-18-2009, 12:33 AM

Thanks for the help Cobalt!
Regardless if there is a normal unmounting during shutting down or not there is a repeat scan of all the bad sectors every time. It would be a great contribution to the BSD family of there was an easy to use disk utility like exists in Windows.

TerryP · #4 08-18-2009, 03:11 AM

You can't fix bad sectors.

Modern hard drives deal with bad sectors by (usually) silently remapping them to spares so the system doesn't see them again. End result: if you see serious bad sector errors through the OS, odds are you're out of spares and will be fscked over.

All you can basically hope for is marking them as 'bad', afaik thats as much as any utility can 'repair' a disk with bad sectors. Try Google and SourceForge for utils that play with that stuff.

my advise: buy a new hard drive and take a good backup.