Bad block list and defragging drive problem.

Hello all, I have a 1.2 gb work: partition on my A1200, using SFS filesystem, and there seems to be a bad block somewhere towards the start of the drive. I've been trying to use sfsdefrag, as the files are scattered in a way similar to buckshot from a shotgun round. When it get to one specific spot on the drive, the hard drive shuts down and makes a sickly grinding noice. After a second or 2, it will spin up again, and repeat until I reboot.

What I need to fix this is:

A block by block scan of the partition
A way to map these blocks out, I beleive this can be done with hdtoolbox, but I need a refresher on how to do this.

Both previous things that are compatable with SFS.

Failing that, I might be able to format the drive if sfsformat can "skip" blocks, but this would require transferring about 700MB over an ethernet cable, hardly the most exciting part of my week....

Any suggestions?

@kvasir

Quote:What you need is a new HD and copy the data from the old one, for which you don't have other current backups, and you have to do it as soon as possible, before your old HD dies completely.

Quote:I'm not sure about the AmigaOS 3.9 HDToolBox, but the AmigaOS 3.1 one had an option to scan the HD and create the bad block list in the RDB. It's a software bad block list and the driver has to support it, the AmigaOS IDE scsi.device does, but if you are using a replacement like IDEFix it may not.
I wouldn't bother with it anyway, IDE HDs only return errors when they don't have any spare sectors for remapping bad sectors any more and you'll get other bad sectors, which can't be remapped by the HD any more, very soon.

Quote:There are no special format programs for SFS which do that. Although there are some marking bad sectors as used for FFS partitions it's not usable with most of them for FFS either: As soon as the partition has to be validated the bad sectors marked as used will be marked as free again and you get errors again.

@kvasir
Hard drives automatically handle bad blocks, but AFAIK they only "fix" the bad block when you attempt to write to it (i.e. reading doesn't do anything).

Therefore copying all the files onto itself (overwriting all the files) should fix it. I guess that copying everything into another partition (or a sub-folder) and then back again would work as well.

@joerg Quote:
One bad block does not mean the HD will die, but it does mean it's possible. Certainly doing a back-up before trying my fix would be a good idea, but everyone should keep a backup anyway...

@ChrisH

Quote:If it would be just a bad sector, or a few, yes. But he wrote "When it get to one specific spot on the drive, hard drive shuts down and makes a sickly grinding noice" which sounds like a larger part of the surface was destroyed by a head crash, and in such a case the HD will destroy itself completely (at least one of it's discs and heads), and it doesn't need much more usage of the HD for it.