Subject: hard drive problem - cannot mark bad blocks

From: Gerry Jensen <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Aug 1996 23:52:42 -0600 (MDT)

Recently, I posted that I got these errors with my hard drive:

hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=2342358,
sector=2342294
end_request: I/O error, dev 03:01, sector 2342294

It also crashed on occasion.  Running "e2fsck -cvf /dev/hda1" didn't fix
the problem.  At Bruce's suggestion, I tried running the badblocks
program.  It found 48 bad blocks.  I then ran "e2fsck -l BadBlocksFile
/dev/hda1"  where BadBlocksFile was the output from running badblocks. 
Everything appeared to worked great for a while after that.  I did a
complete backup of the hard drive without getting any of these messages
(previously, I got many of these errors during backups and sometimes a
crash).  Running the badblocks program after that did not turn up any bad
blocks. 

I then left town for a few days.  When I came back, we were once again
getting these messages.  I tried doing the same fix as before.  Running
badblocks revealed the same 48 bad blocks as before.  However, now after
running "e2fsck -l BadBlocksFile /dev/hda1" the problem still persists. It
appears that the bad blocks aren't being put in the list of bad blocks for
the filesystem.  But, running "dumpe2fs /dev/hda1" shows that those blocks
are indeed marked as bad blocks! 

Any thoughts on what could be happening and what I could try next? 

Thanks,

Gerry
[email-masked]