Re: The Small Company's Guide to Hard Drive Failure and Linux

[Dragos Ruiu <dr () kyx net>]

On November 18, 2004 06:49 am, Dave Aitel wrote:
> Some good stuff about disk drives.

I was cleaning out some old mail messages and ran across dave excellent tome
about disks, and finally read it :-).

I wanted to add an addenda:

Often failing disks can be rejuvenated with a little trick I called
the "Muppet Labs Disk Rejuvenator":

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hda bs=512k
(or whatever drive is appropiate)

It's safe, really.

Why does this work? Well it rewrites everything on the drive with 
a fresh copy with really crisp whiter and brighter new transitions 
on the magnetic encoding and crc and such, and in some cases 
lets the drive's own low level sector remapping firmware invisibly
reallocate bad segments on the drive unbeknownst to the user.

sounds silly. but it really works, and has saved me a lot of money 
on drive replacements. try it. if the drive still complains after, _then_
junk it.

cheers,
--dr

-- 
World Security Pros. Cutting Edge Training, Tools, and Techniques
Vancouver, Canada       May 4-6 2005  http://cansecwest.com
pgpkey http://dragos.com/ kyxpgp
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