Possible to Skip Bad Sectors in Installation?

HI guys!

I am helping a friend whose HDD started to give him troubles. The moe frustrating thing is it is only 13 months old. It came with Windows 7 starter installed in an HP netbook 110-3500.

Anyway, I am planning to double-boot it with Ubuntu and I wanted to know:

1) If it's possible to identify where the bad sectors on the HD are located?
2) Is it possible to skip those bad sectors in installation.

Like if I divide the HD into say... 10 chunks and errors are found in three and four, I am thinking if I can just skip those sectors. It's a 350G HD by the way and my friend won't mind if we get to use only 200G (or lessr) just as long as it can last for at least another year (or two).

Please enlighten me on this. Thank you very much!

regards,

nujinini

It is normal for a disk to have a few defective sectors.
The firmware takes care of that and uses spare ones.

However, if there are too many bad sectors, then the OS will see them as well.
This is a sign, that the disk is about to break down.

I wouldnt trust such a disk. My suggestion for your friend is: Replace it.
Maybe it is still under warranty?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Irithori

It is normal for a disk to have a few defective sectors.
The firmware takes care of that and uses spare ones.

However, if there are too many bad sectors, then the OS will see them as well.
This is a sign, that the disk is about to break down.

I wouldnt trust such a disk. My suggestion for your friend is: Replace it.
Maybe it is still under warranty?

---

Thank you Irithori!

The sad thing is the warranty just expired on the 12th month and the problem showed up on the 13th month. That's why my friend is angry at HP... hehehe.

Thanks again!

Seems like there is command badblocks to find the bad blocks . If I'm not wrong ,you can tell e2fsck program to tell skip these bad block and don't use them.
man e2fsck says

Quote:

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-c This option causes e2fsck to use badblocks(8) program to do a read-only scan of the device in order to find any bad
blocks. If any bad blocks are found, they are added to the bad block inode to prevent them from being allocated to a
file or directory. If this option is specified twice, then the bad block scan will be done using a non-destructive
read-write test.

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If you google more about commands like "badblocks" and "e2fsck". You should probably find the answer. I haven't do that so can't help more :p
If you find the answer please post them here :D

Hello Lakshmipathi!

Thank you for your suggestion. The pooch is dead. It can no longer be detected by any of my systems. Thanks anyway!

regards,

nujinini