Reading Hard Drive Blocks

[Todd Day <todd>]

I recently enquired about removing a bad block that sometimes shows up
in my unix.log.  Well, I suspect that my bad block has something to do
with the uucp stuff, as the error times always seem to coincide with
some item in /usr/spool/uucp/LOGFILE.  If I get rid of this bad block
it could be catastrophic to my mailing system.

I was wondering if there is some way to go out and actually read the block
before I delete it, so I can see what it is and prepare for its removal.
Actually, what I was really thinking of doing was renaming whatever file
it happened to be in to file.old and copy it to itself.

Another thing I was wondering is what causes soft errors.  I mean, how
does the computer recover from something like a bad hard disk read?

Thanks in advance.

-- 
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