HD Instalation Software

[Piru]

Modern IDE drives maintain the badblock list internally, totally hiding the activity from the interface. From the interface's perspective the disk appears like before, even though badblocks have been mapped.

Only when the disk runs out of spare storage for badblock mapping (certain percentage of the disk is reserved for this), the disk will report error thru the normal interface.

SMART will report problems earlier, however.

[Piru]

Everytime I format something (HD or FD) I use MyFormat. It checks for bad blocks while formatting.

MyFormat can mark bad blocks/sector for FFS/OFS. This is not the same as BadBlock list of the hard disk, though still useful with floppies that are getting corrupt, but still can be used for some temp storage.

Note that hard disk reports back error only if a) the damage occured suddenly without warning, and the block(s)/track could not be moved & mapped to secure area before. or b) the disk is running out of extra storage for bad block mapping.

Usually you never get to see physical errors before the disk has become unbearably slow to use (due to countless retries and slowness caused by the bad block mapping) or the hd completely dies (fails to spin up, or shuts down after power on).