I read in some sysadmin’s guide a tip on bad blocks on your hard drive. It said that you can make a small partition that just encloses those blocks on the disk, then leave in unmounted and unused. Supposedly that will reduce the disk r/w to that area, keeping the problem from growing. As my otherwise well-performing system disk (a rather important one!) has a region of bad blocks (very close together) I am very interested in the idea. But I am not quite sure how to create a partition using blocks as a reference. Could someone give me a few pointers?
Thanks!
PS. I should have mentioned this; the filesystems are ext3 over the whole drive.