harddisk damage

Hi,

I had some physical damage on my harddisk while transporting. One
partition had problems, but I cleared the complete harddisk from an
emergency linux floppy with

dd if=\dev\zero of=\dev\hda

and it stopped with I/O Error at sector 73......, while the fdisk verify
partition table option says 80...... sectors, so I`m afraid (although not
sure) that the damage is still there.

The question is, can I use a portion of my harddisk by putting partitions
only at the undamaged area ? If yes, how to do that ?
Thankx

Zoltan Kadar

Z.M. Kadar wrote:
> The question is, can I use a portion of my harddisk by putting partitions
> only at the undamaged area ? If yes, how to do that ?

I suppose people have not answered by now because they may not know the
exact answer. I am a newbie to operating my own unix derivative system
but I was experimenting with installing multiple linux and bsd operating
systems this past summer. Installation routines such as Red Hat and
Mandrake are not very useful but there were other distributions that
checked every sector for damage after paritioning the drive and before
installing the filesystem. I believe FreeBSD, among others, did this.

I think you can experiment with two different options.
1) I believe FreeBSD allows partitioning in sector disk units. You
could attempt to create partitions up to the 70th sector or so.

2) You could attempt to create partitions just like normal, and let the
diskcheck routine find the damaged sectors and deal with it during
filesystem installation.

It is highly improbable that you will be able to access any sector
beyond the 73rd sector.
I suggest not putting important data on this hard drive.
Chances are the drive is bad and will have to be replaced.

-Scott