USB booting :: Got dsl to work but...
If you know at what point , percentage-wise, the bad sectors are on your drive,
you could partition it in half ( make 2 partitions - equal size ) ,
then skip the half that has the bad sectors, and run mkswap /dev/hdXx ,
and then swapon /dev/hdXx on the good half..
( hdXx = your drive - possibly hda1 or hda2 )
That would give some swap , and a little more use out of the drive before
it fails completely.. Usually, when they start to go, they go quickly...
73
ke4nt
It seems to be all over the drive, what would be your best guess on how to partition it to use it. I have a suspicion that the drive head is bad....
Get a new drive from a dumpster or from E-Bay.
Trying to use a failing drive to store data, even temporarily inside a swap file / swap partition is a bad idea.
You might corrupt a critical part of your memory when it gets swapped out to disk and then when you try to access that memory again it will hose your computer. Most likely it will just cause a crash and loss of in-use tasks but it could also corrupt important documents if you save your corrupted work to permanent storage media and over-write the good stuff.
original here.