Bad sector in computing refers to a disk sector on a disk storage unit that is permanently damaged. Upon taking damage, all information stored on that sector is lost. When a bad sector is found and marked, the operating system skips it in the future.
Details
A bad sector is the result of mechanical damage. Bad sectors are a threat to information security in the sense of data remanence. Very often physical damages can interfere with parts of many different files.
Operating system
Bad sectors may be detected by the operating system or the disk controller. Most file systems contain provisions for sectors to be marked as bad, so that the operating system avoids them in the future. Disk diagnostic utilities, such as CHKDSK (Microsoft Windows), Disk Utility (on macOS), or badblocks (on Linux) can actively look for bad sectors upon user request.
Disk controller
When a sector is found to be bad or unstable by the firmware of a disk controller, the disk controller remaps the logical sector to a different physical sector. Typically, automatic remapping of sectors only happens when a sector is written to. In the normal operation of a hard drive, the detection and remapping of bad sectors should take place in a manner transparent to the rest of the system and in advance before data is lost. There are two types of remapping by disk hardware: P-LIST (mapping during factory production tests) and G-LIST (mapping during consumer usage by disk microcode).[1] Utilities can read the Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (SMART) information to tell how many sectors have been reallocated, and how many spare sectors the drive may still have.[2] Because reads and writes from G-list sectors are automatically redirected (remapped) to spare sectors, it slows down drive access even if data in drive is defragmented. Once the G-list is filled up, the storage unit must be replaced.[3][4]
See also
- Spiradisc - a copy protection scheme writing sectors on spiraling paths on the disk rather than in concentric circles.
- Sector slipping – a method of avoiding bad sectors
- ARccOS Protection – bad sector protection on DVDs, used by Sony.
References
- ^ "Bad Sector Remapping". mjm.co.uk.
- ^ Monitoring Hard Disks with SMART.Linux Journal, 2004.
- ^ "Encyclopedia". PCMag.com. Ziff Davis.
- ^ Stephens, Curtis E, ed. (December 11, 2006), Information technology - AT Attachment 8 - ATA/ATAPI Command Set (ATA8-ACS), working draft revision 3f (PDF), ANSI INCITS, pp. 198–213, 327–344, archived from the original (PDF) on 2007-07-30