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This is not a question so you can ignore it.

I have an old machine with old disks I was having problems with.  I was
going to reformat the disks and restore from backup (Bacula) but I
decided to play first.

I have read that IDE disk will reassign bad sectors to alternate
locations only if there is an error during a write, so bad reads don't
do you any good.  I have read the fix is to write /dev/zero to the whole
disk so write errors cause reassignment.

There are three disks in the machine, each on its own IDE interface
(there are four in this machine).  Partition 1 is RAID 1 with 3 disks,
partition 2 is swap with 3 disks and partition 3 is RAID 5 with 3 disks.
 I decided to take each disk offline, zero it, restore the partition
table and resync it, basically to see if it works.  It seems to.

I typed all these commands it one at a time to make sure I knew what was
going on, but I added them to a script as I did it.  Here is the script.

If there is an easier way to fix bad sectors I would be happy to hear
about it.  This isn't actually hard for me but it takes many hours of
the computers time.

Bill

DO NOT RUN THIS SCRIPT!!

#!/bin/bash

first=/dev/hdc
next=/dev/hda

echo testing arrays
mdadm -D --test /dev/md0 || exit
mdadm -D --test /dev/md1 || exit

echo turning off swap
swapoff /dev/${first}2

echo fail and remove ${first}1 from /dev/md0
mdadm /dev/md0 -f ${first}1
mdadm /dev/md0 -r ${first}1

echo fail and remove ${first}3 from /dev/md1
mdadm /dev/md1 -f ${first}3
mdadm /dev/md1 -r ${first}3

echo time to clear disk
sleep 20
dd if=/dev/zero of=$first

echo reloading partition table
sfdisk -d ${next} | sfdisk /dev/${first}

echo activating incomplete arrays
mdadm -Ac partitions -m 0 /dev/md0
mdadm -Ac partitions -m 1 /dev/md1

echo adding back empty partitions
mdadm /dev/md0 -a ${first}1
mdadm /dev/md1 -a ${first}3

echo formating and activating swap
mkswap /dev/${first}2
swapon /dev/${first}2


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