# Why is disk failure handled so poorly?

## Emopig

Hi,

It looks like one of my disks is failing. Whenever I try and emerge --update chromium the severe disk churn eventually causes my primary disk to hit one of the 40-odd bad sectors it has on it. When this happens my entire system freezes, the controller disconnects/resets the drive and the system shuts down, all 3 keyboard LEDs flashing...

Is it so bloody hard for the disk to say "Ok, that sector is buggared, let's try another..."?. We're talking of a few dozen sectors out of millions here ffs and it basically means I'm playing emerge roulette.

Also with 2.6.35 my root partition appears to be mounting as ext2, despite the fact it is ext4.

 :Shocked: 

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## NeddySeagoon

Emopig,

If you can actually see bad sectors on your drive, it has either run out of spares (so throw it away) or the error is a read error, which will not be remapped until the data has been recovered. Yu really don't want your drive silently throwing away your data.

What does smartmontools have to say about the drives internal error log?

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