Shouldn't this work? dd command issues.

ickabob · 2011-03-08 00:01:51

I'm hoping to bring together a hodge podge of old parts lying about into a sweet smoking Arch machine.
I've got everything I need, except what I thought would be the easiest part of the whole box... a usable hard disk.

After finding two reasonably new disks, I threw them in the set up I had at the time, everything was peachy-keen.
Turns out, both disks flop with IO errors after about 36hour uptime, I think they have bad sectors.... maybe I dreamt this, but I thought
hard-disk firmware hides bad sectors from the OS by remapping them... maybe not.
Anyways I want to zero both disks, forcing the sectors to be remapped or quarantined off or w/e the manufacturers have them do.

So I booted the box up with my trust Arch install disk, booted the live cd and am sitting here at the root prompt
trying to run

 dd of=/dev/sda if=/dev/null bs=512

the above returns the stats of execution:

0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 byte (0 B) copied, etc.

Is the above bash not attempmting to do what I think it is?
plz halp! Thanks for reading.

ataraxia · 2011-03-08 00:07:35

/dev/null returns nothing but EOF on read. Use /dev/zero for this.

In any case, by the time you see I/O errors, you're probably hosed anyway. Modern drives DO remap bad blocks for you, letting you see such I/O errors only when all the spares are already gone and the disk is dying.

ickabob · 2011-03-08 02:46:51

Thanks for the reply and the information, the changed made everything work

Totally bogus that a 500GB Wester Dig harddrive made in 2009 would have so many bad blocks.....

What usually produces a bad block, a hard kill of a system?

Stebalien · 2011-03-08 05:52:10

Shutdowns usually only cause data errors (files not written to disk). Disk problems are usually a result of physical abuse (sudden motion, shock, etc...).

Arch Linux

#1 2011-03-08 00:01:51

Shouldn't this work? dd command issues.

#2 2011-03-08 00:07:35

Re: Shouldn't this work? dd command issues.

#3 2011-03-08 02:46:51

Re: Shouldn't this work? dd command issues.

#4 2011-03-08 05:52:10

Re: Shouldn't this work? dd command issues.

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