Laptop hard drive bad?

[Deadwood]

I have a 40 GB hard drive on a Dell Latitude 400. While attempting to write to a large file I got an I/O error. An fsck of the reiserfs and a reboot later, I still get the same error on the write. The following message appeared in my system log:
[kernel] hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }

Is the hard kaput? My system otherwise works, but I don't want to keep using a hard drive that's going down. Can I do some sort of procedure that marks portions of the disk as bad so that they get avoided?

 

[sechs]

What make/model drive is it?

Running the manufacturer's utilities should allow you to diagnose any problems and reassign bad sectors. As always, backup first.

 

[Deadwood]

I am away from home and I am unable to find a diagnostic disk. I don't have a floppy drive and I don't have a windows 98 disk to construct a boot environment in which to use a downloaded diagnostic tool. I think I'll just press my luck until I get home in a few days. I backed up before I left, and I regularly check code into a svn repository, so I think I'm okay as far as data backup goes.

The drive's under warranty, though I don't have time at the moment to deal with replacement or rebuilding my gentoo installation.

 

[Tannin]

Seek errors are, in my experience, always very bad news. So far as frequent backing up goes until you can swap the drive out, I advise paranoia.

 

[Tannin]

Oh, and remind me to read posts more carefully before I reply to them. Should you run a utility to block off certain areas? My feeling is no: I'd ask the drive to do as little work as possible in this case, and not risk running any activity-intensive testing software on it until you have a replacement ready.

 

[Deadwood]

Well, I bought a new hard drive last week, and salvaged what I could off the old hard drive. I need to do backups more often. I lost 4 months of emails. I performed a couple more recent backups, but the hard drive failure apparently predated those. I never checked to make sure my backup process completed, an ommission I will soon be remedying.