Bad Block Recovery - Disk Management

Disks have moving parts and some tolerances, they are prone to failure. Most disks even come from the factory with bad blocks. Depending on the disk and controller in use, these blocks are handled in a variety of ways.

- Simple disks such as disks with IDE controllers, bad blocks are handled manually.
The MS-DOS format command does a logical format, scans the disk to find bad blocks. If format finds a bad block, it writes a special value into the corresponding FAT entry to tell the allocation routines not to use that block.

- More sophisticated disks, such as SCSI disks used in high-end PCs and most workstations, are smarter about bad block recovery. The controller has a list of bad blocks on the disk and this list is initialized during low-level format at factory, and is updated over the life of the disk. Low-level formatting also sets aside spare sectors not visible to operating system. The controller can be told to replace each bad sector logically with one of the spare sectors. This scheme is called sector sparing.

A typical bad sector transaction :
- The operating system tries to read logical block 87.
- The controller calculates the ECC and finds that the sector is bad. It reports this finding to the operating system.
- The next time the system is rebooted, a special command is run to tell the SCSI controller to replace the bad sector with a spare.
- After this, whenever the system requests logical block 87, the request is translated into the replacement sector's address by the controller.

An alternative to sector sparing, some controllers can be instructed to replace a bad block by sector slipping.
The replacement of a bad block generally is not a totally automatic process, because the data in the bad block usually are lost. Thus, whatever file was using that block must be repaired, and that requires manual intervention.