bad HD sectors

[JD]

On 06/19/2010 09:56 PM, Peter Langfelder was caught red-handed while 
writing::
> On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 9:04 PM, JD<jd1008 at gmail.com>  wrote:
>    
>>      
>    
>> Well, I am not actively using the disk. Too risky.
>> I am trying to find out if there is reasonable doubt
>> as to what the smartd is reporting as if the are recent
>> errors.
>> At this point I will try to see if it is still
>> under warranty and have it serviced.
>>      
> You may want to consider using fsck to check for bad sectors within
> your filesystem(s). This will definitely not report bad sectors that
> were marked as such by the manufacturer. But it may take more time
> than finding out whether smart reports them.
>
> Peter
>    

I thought fsck simply checks the metadata
of the filesystem, free blocks and allocated
blocks, cylinder groups, inodes...etc.

So, it is not clear that fsck will detect new
bad blocks.

I read about the old days when the drives did not
do auto  bad block forwarding (re-mapping). There
was a low level formatter which actually detected
the bad blocks and remapped them. Unfortunately
for today, once the drive runs out of spare good
blocks to forward bad blocks to, throw it away.
I really wish there was such a low level formatter
for today's drives. It would extend the life of a
drive a little longer.