34 bad blocks, what should I do?

[tauro_kpo]

I ran

sudo badblocks -v /dev/sdb

in an old 8 GB disk, in which I'm intending to install Ubuntu Server.

Found 34 bad blocks (is that a lot?) and I don't know exactly what to do next. How do I put the bad blocks apart, so that they won't be used? Should I create the partitions that I'm going to use and format them before/after?

Thank you very much in advance

[oz]

If your drive has started developing bad blocks, it's very likely that it will continue to do so until total failure. Judging by the size of the drive, I'm guessing that it's fairly old?

Anyway, if it were me, I'd obtain a new drive or at least one that isn't developing bad blocks.

[tauro_kpo]

Thanks oz.

I agree, but I wanted to rehabilitate this old piece of junk at least with DSL. If it would have been possible to turn it into a cheap home server it would have been great. But... I guess I should drop this idea and dump it.

I'm curious, how is that the bad blocks start appearing and "reproduce"? Is it wear of the disk?

By the way, it is more than a decade old, from 1999.

[oz]

You could always try using it to see what happens, but you shouldn't count on the drive to work properly. I'd be afraid to depend on it for anything critical due to its age alone.

Bad sectors can be caused by lots of things such as physical wear, overheating, moisture, corrosion, the head making contact with the disk surface, etc.

[tauro_kpo]

I couldn't even format it with gparted. So that's it. It's the end. Everything's lost.