[NTLUG:Discuss] Repairing?? bad disk sectors in Linux?

[richard witt]

On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 2:31 PM, John K. Taber <jktaber at charter.net> wrote:
> I'm not sure of terminology, so bear with me.
>
> I'm running a dual boot system, with Windows XP SP3 on the first drive,
> which I recently had replaced. And I'm running FC 6 on a second drive.
>
> Before replacing, I used Seatools to check both drives. The Windows drive
> had to be replaced. The FC 6 drive also had an error, but not fatal.
>
> The FC 6 drive fails the short disk test, which I gather means a bad sector
> (I could be wrong).
>
> Now, how do we handle disk errors (not file errors, disk errors) in Linux?
> Is there a Linux command, or a utility that will find the bad sector, and
> remove it from use? In other words, something similar to Windows disk tools.
>
> Or is finding and bypassing bad disk spots something done under the covers
> in the Linux world.
>
> And how about defragmenting? In a real operating system, defragmenting is
> done by the OS in spare moments. Does Linux work like that? I would assume
> so, but I don't know.

John i think what you probably want here is fsck. I hate to say RTFM,
but read the man pages. Great resource for all of its options. HTH