I'm accumulating quite a collection of IDE hard drives -- in general I seem to be more successful running possibly marginal drives under Windows than under Linux.

I suspect (but do not know) that Windows formatting utilities do a better job of finding and avoiding use of bad blocks than Linux. (Or maybe Linux tolerates a lower number of bad blocks.)

On the other hand, I think Linux may have more tools available to help -- for example the program badblocks which will test a drive and provide a list of the bad blocks. If they are concentrated in one area, potentially I could create a(n unused) partition encompassing those bad blocks and then make use of the remainder of the drive.

There may be other similar techniques available.

One thing I need to be able to do is to translate between block numbers and sector (cluster?) (start) numbers so that I can recognize where to start and end a partition to encompass those bad blocks.

I read somewhere (recently) that "all blocks" are 512 bytes. I think somewhere on Wikilearn I have some information on sector / cluster / platters, etc. (Note to me: Do a search!)

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• () RandyKramer - 01 Nov 2002
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