When Linux hard drives go bad

[mark at buttery.org (Mark J. Dulcey)]

Duane Morin wrote:
> I think my laptop is dying.  For some apps (particularly mozilla) it goes 
> into this weird hang mode where all I can hear is this rhythmic 
> "kachunkachunkachunka" noise for many seconds.   Also some copy operations 
> in the file system have failed with weird "IO errors".  Lastly and perhaps 
> most importantly, sometimes when rebooting the machine it gives me a 
> failure to check the file system.
> 
> Assuming for the moment that a new laptop is not in my future, is there a 
> way that I can somehow detect and flag bad sectors on the drive?  Or at 
> least determine which files use those bad areas so that I can work around 
> them?  Mozilla is the primary culprit, but not the only one.

Laptop hard drives aren't expensive these days (for instance, 
pricewatch.com is showing $109 for a 40GB drive), and on modern laptops, 
they're easy to replace. Most systems have them in some sort of 
removable cradle thing. You don't need a drive made specifically for 
your Thinkpad; just get a standard drive, remove the old one from its 
cradle, and put the new one in.

Sometimes those sorts of I/O errors can be cured by using badblocks, or 
(more comprehensively) by doing a low-level format with a utility from 
the drive manufacturer (which will detect and invisibly remap all of 
them), but I'm inclined to distrust a drive that is behaving badly.