SpinRite (was: FYI)

[Bill McGonigle]

On 04/28/2013 11:19 AM, Ben Scott wrote:
>   But "badblocks
> -n" will do the same thing, for free.

As I understand it, it's not the same (at the block layer VS the ATA 
layer), but:

   hdparm --read-sector 27878798
   hdparm --write-sector 27878798  --yes-i-know-what-i-am-doing /dev/sdb

will do what SpinRite does.

I had a drive on our DVR that kept kicking a disk out of the array. 
badblocks didn't help it.  Grepping the logs for the bad sector (md 
reports bad reads) and doing the above got the drive to re-map and after 
re-adding the partition to the array it's been stable for 6 months or so 
(yay, bash history).

I should emphasize that this drive is part of a mirror on a device that 
plays TV shows to kids and there are nightly backups.  Given that, it 
saved a hundred bucks on a replacement drive.

I'm not sure if any of the fistful of dd_*rescue* tools integrate this. 
  If they did, that would be pretty close to a free SpinRite clone.

-Bill

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