[SLUG] smartctl drive monitoring

[lukekendall@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

I'm using smartctl to monitor the health of my hard drives.  This
weekend, after returning from holidays and turning my computer on, I
got email from the smartctl daemon reporting a problem.

Looking at http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/BadBlockHowTo.txt
it says in a couple of places that you can force the system to
reallocate the bad blocks that you've carefully identified, by doing
this kind of thing:

    Finally we force the disk to reallocate the three bad blocks:
    [root]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda3 bs=4096 count=3 seek=3778301
    [root]# sync

(NOTE to newbies: doing the above specific command on your system would
probably damage it.)

Anyway, my question is:  how does writing something to a bad block
force the disk to reallocate the block?  And, is it the disc that does
this, or Linux?

luke

[root@posh luke]# /usr/sbin/smartctl -l selftest /dev/hdb
smartctl version 5.26 Copyright (C) 2002-3 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num  Test_Description    Status                  Remaining  LifeTime(hours)  LBA_of_first_error
# 1  Short offline       Completed: read failure       60%      2944         0x01a64960
# 2  Extended offline    Completed without error       00%      1148         -
# 3  Short offline       Completed without error       00%      1146         -