unread block

[Rommel Cuevas]

I have HP 9000 box.HP-UX b.10.20. is it possible to repair a bad block on my disk?
when i ran fsck, it says that "cannot read block 117854". that block hit my root partition. is theres a way that i could fix this problem without formatting the disk. my colleague says' that i should format the disk.
Is this the only way?

[V.Tamilvanan]

Hi,
It may be just a File System corruption or a harddisk physical failure. confirm it by running dd.

#dd if=/dev/rdsk/cXtXdX of=/dev/null

If you are stuck with some error . you need to replace the disk. If there is no error you have to create a new Filesystem as you already checked with fsck.

[Robert-Jan Goossens]

Hi,

I'm afraid he is right; I would even suggest replacing the disk if this is a vital server.

Kind regards,
Robert-Jan

[Bharat Katkar]

Rommel,
There is something called BBRA, Bad block relocation area on your disk. Any block if corrupted is marked bad and the BBRA is used to assign new block to your filesystem.
Don't format unless and until problem gets really worse.
Try repairing the disk using fsck.
See man fsck, for all available options.

[Rommel Cuevas]

hi guys, thank you very for ur help. i really apprecite it. more power to u guys.

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately, there is no way to fix this block in 10.20. fsck does not check data areas, it checks the directory structures and a "cannot read" error message means that the filesystem cannot be repaired. The bad block contains critical directory structure information which cannot be ignored. Because today's disks are much more complicated (and non-standard) in their error handling, it is no longer possible to fix bad blocks with simple commands. Instead, the drive's firmware must accomplish the task using the mediainit command. Since this formats the entire drive, you'll need to take appropriate steps to save the data and create a recovery strategy.