On Fri, Sep 08, 2006 at 02:46:48PM +0200, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:

| On Fri, 8 Sep 2006, Ronan KERYELL wrote:
| > Third, what about bad blocks on disk? How to skip them in a raw partition
| > if you do not have state-of-the-art disks that do block remapping for you
| > in your back-yard (such as SCSI)? Often FS do these tricks for you on
| > IDE disks for example.
| 
| These days IDE does that too.
| But if there are too many of them, you loose (same for SCSI).

A few years ago I was doing a forensics security review for a client that
had data that needed to be erased VERY reliably.  The determination was
that because even IDE disks did remapping internally, it would be possible
for previously written data to be inaccessible to a program writing random
data over the whole disk several times.  The only way to ensure that this
confidential data was destroyed was to grind the disk to dust, or at least
do so to the platters.  But modern IDE disks perhaps are indeed doing this.
I haven't had a bad sector on such a disk in years.

-- 
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| Phil Howard KA9WGN       | http://linuxhomepage.com/      http://ham.org/ |
| (first name) at ipal.net | http://phil.ipal.org/   http://ka9wgn.ham.org/ |
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