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I have a main boot drive, plus 4 additional drives on my Fedora 11 machine. Palimpsest Disk Utility says 3 of the (non-boot) drives have bad sectors. How can I go about repairing these sectors? These drives currently have data on them I don't want to lose.

Thanks.

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Since this is not stricly programming related, this should go to superuser.com. Your question will probably be soon migrated there so you can create an account an follow up over there. – ChristopheD Feb 26 '10 at 7:03
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Feb 26 '10 at 7:07

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4 Answers

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Palimpsest is well known for erroneous reports, especially due to specific interpretation of S.M.A.R.T. statistics. I suggest you to use other test tools (smartctl for example) before making a final decision about the state of your hard disks.

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There is a program called SpinRite that will try to recover as much as possible. From the wikipedia article:

SpinRite tests the data surfaces of read-write magnetic disks including IDE, SATA, USB, floppy, ZIP and others. It analyzes their contents and is claimed to be able to refresh magnetic disk surfaces to allow them to operate more reliably.

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If you're using an ext* filesystem, you can use e2fsck -c. See this previous answer.

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Take a backup of everything you can as soon as possible, then use the only program I know of that can repair bad sectors - spinrite.

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