[zagnutty]

If anyone here at AVS will know, I'll probably find them in this part of the forums.


The HDD in my HTPC finally started getting pretty bad, so I replaced it with a 2TB drive. However, I hate to toss the old 1TB drive just yet. I can still run it into the ground and use it until it becomes completely unusable. I only plan to use the good partition(s) for video editing and nothing more. There's a program for Win called Partition Bad Disk (PBD) that scans and performs sector slipping. But it's the only software I know of. Being the cheapska...er, financially cautious person I am, was wondering if you Linux guys knew of anything that will do the same thing.



Thanks!

 

[quantumstate]

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[zagnutty]

I've been a dedicated WD user for about 15 years now. It's a 1TB Green drive. It was originally in a WD My Book World Edition NAS. It's performance was always sub-par. Then a year and a half ago, which was about a year and a half after I bought the NAS device, it crashed hard. I was able to use UFS Explorer to recover all of my files from the drive (which was XFS or EXT2/3. I don't remember).


Anyhow, it appeared as if the hardware in the device failed, so I kept the drive and used it in my HTPC build. I scanned the drive, and sure enough, it had bad sectors as well and I knew it was only a matter of time until I would have to replace it. It started acting up again about 2 weeks ago, so I have replaced it with a 2TB version. I did lose some things, but fortunately nothing sentimental.


I tried running "Write Zeroes" from the Lifeguard utility twice. It gets about half done and just freezes. I came across the program "Partition Bad Disk" which scans the drive and creates partitions with the bad sectors omitted. First scan froze part way through. The second scan completed though. However, a full purchase is required in order to create the partitions.


Was hoping there may be a way to do a similar thing in Linux without having to pay for a program. The drive will die completely sooner or later. I would just be throwing money away by purchasing a program to prolong the drives life. I'm going to try writing zeroes again.

 

[quantumstate]

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[zagnutty]

I've had a box running Ubuntu setup a few times. Problem is, it just sits due to incompatibility issues with the various video NLE's and photography editing programs I need to use. But, when need calls for Linux, I use a live disc. Even when the My Book crashed I was unable to access the drive via Linux. I got lucky with UFS Explorer thankfully. I do happen to have a 1GHz Pentium machine, with a few 20gb HDD's, collecting dust I may setup with Linux for torrents. It should perform pretty well with a small distro like Puppy.


As for this current drive this thread is about, I think it's destined for the scrap heap. Well, after I disassemble it and take a blow torch to the platters (don't have a drill press). I've tried using the WD utility to write zeroes to it and about once every second a "write zeroes error!" error pops up. It just doesn't want to let anything access it.

 

[quantumstate]

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[zagnutty]

Temp is reading 34c, which should be well within normal operating parameters. I've been running HDD Regenerator on it now for two days and showing 1264 bad sectors.


Played around with Tor a couple months back. Fortunately most of my computer usage is video / photo editing and gaming on the main desktop. The HTPC generally has no connection to the outside world. Don't have a laptop anymore (traded it for a killer bass guitar) and getting the gf to practice "safe surfing" and virus scans is like asking N. Korea to halt it's nuclear development. As for backup, I keep the irreplaceable things backed up on an external and usually DL DVD as well. As cheap as high capacity "thumb drives" have gotten, I'll probably be picking up a 32gb or 64gb drive and backing up the important stuff on that as well. Haven't done a backup in a few months though and need to. This was a close call though and I would have lost some irreplaceable photos and videos since my last backup.