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A bad sector in computing is a disk sector on a disk storage unit that is unreadable. Upon taking damage, all information stored on that sector is lost. When a bad sector is found and marked, the operating system like Windows or Linux will skip it in the future. Bad sectors are a threat to information security in the sense of data remanence.
Internal hard drive defect management is a system present in hard drives for handling of bad sectors.The systems are generally proprietary and vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, but typically consist of a "P" (for "permanent" or "primary") list of bad sectors detected in the manufacturing stage and a "G" (for "growth") list of bad sectors that crop up after manufacturing. [1]
A more common use case is the invocation of badblocks as part of e2fsck when passing the option "-c" to scan for bad blocks and prevent data from being stored on these blocks. This is done by adding the list of found bad blocks to the bad block inode to prevent the affected sectors from being allocated to a file or directory.
When using sector slipping for bad sectors, disk access time is not largely affected. The drive will skip over a bad sector using the time it would have used to read it. Spare sectors are located on the disk to aid in having sectors to “slip” other sectors down to, allowing for the preservation of sequential ordering of the data.
Also, even if the physical disk is damaged at one location, such that a certain sector is unreadable, the disk may be able to use spare space to replace the bad area, so that the sector can be overwritten. [21] More detail on the health of the drive may be obtained by examining the S.M.A.R.T. Attributes.
Bad sectors: some magnetic sectors may become faulty without rendering the whole drive unusable. This may be a limited occurrence or a sign of imminent failure. A drive that has any reallocated sectors at all has a significantly increased chance of failing soon. [citation needed]
Versions of Windows more recent than Windows XP support the larger sector sizes, as well as Mac OS X, and Linux has supported larger sector sizes since 2.6.31 [20] or 2.6.32, [21] but issues with boot loaders, partitioning tools and computer BIOS implementations present certain limitations, [22] since they are often hard-wired to reserve only ...
Fixed-block architecture (FBA) is an IBM term for the hard disk drive (HDD) layout in which each addressable block (more commonly, sector) on the disk has the same size, utilizing 4 byte block numbers and a new set of command codes. [1]