Hello,

Now booted dsl with the pendrive, I noticed that the harddisk has lot of bad clusters. I would like to install damnsmalllinux and exclude them during install , with a format enhanced checking for bad clusters and excluding them, before installing/copying the files on the hda.

Please how could we perform this since DSL do not offer this feature for old machines, with possible bad clusters BEFORE COPYING?

thank you for any help!

Usually you run "badblocks", or run "e2fsck -c" (assuming ext2/3), but I'm not sure those would be available in DSL at the start of an install. Perhaps run one of those in a LiveCD of another distro? I managed to do that with an Ubuntu LiveCD IIRC.

But I must warn you: I have never seen a drive with more than a few bad blocks stay that way - all the drives I have seen that start to have noticeable bad blocks have quickly developed more and more until the drive was completely useless. I'd recommend you don't even bother.

I installed the linux and then did the badblocks checking afterwards, it is a frugal install.
But I fear that some files are corrupted.... it is too late not good


Oh, this harddisk, I know it very well. It is an old friend now. the pc is old of 10-12 years already and the harddisk has been more than used and those bad clusters are still the same. I shall find out the brand cuz it is a very good one. the bad clusters are originally caused by the ex owner that played with coding on harddisk, with specific harddisk programs. Was a good computer at that time, and bad clusters are always the same, never more. There is a dos program in the fat32 partition to make them excluded for dos.