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Hmm. Mark, is there any reason you couldn't just write zeros to that one sector? I mean, it would still corrupt the filesystem, but it would take less time to do it. Or maybe there's not a good way to find where the offset to that sector is.


Modern drives don't write individual sectors -- generally, they only write entire tracks. So if we don't overwrite the entire track, then the drive will try to do a Read-Modify-Write instead, which of course will fail, since the track has a bad sector..

Catch-22, kind of. Often one *can* rewrite a single sector, or a single track (group of sectors), but it' much simpler to just overwrite the entire drive.

After all, we don't know which important file that sector was part of.. (undoubtedly an .mp3 file, but..).

Cheers