I want to know if I have badblocks on my sdb5 HDD.

[Jonas Norlander]

2008/11/20 Gene Heskett <gene.heskett at verizon.net>:
> You cannot format a recent hard drive, with recent being defined as nearly 20
> years now.  The drives are factory formatted, and require instrumentation we
> don't have, so they just spin for a bit and return with no error. All we do
> is write the filesystems logical structure when we mke2fs a partition.
>

For most of the time called low-level formatting.

> I believe badblocks can work in that asked about mode, if e2fsck tells it
> where to start and stop the scan at the partition boundaries.  That would
> tend to automate the process for a beginner, at the expense of having to run
> it on all the individual partitions in order to cover the whole disk.
>
> From the badblocks manpage, it can generate a file in the correct format to
> send back to mke2fs or e2fsck and do it automatically from what I read.
>
> So I would run it to generate the file, (on a usb key or someplace not on that
> drive) and then feed that file to e2fsck as a separate operation, which would
> check (and repair if it can) the whole drive in only 2 operations.  The first
> run is a lengthy procedure timewise, so expect an hour or more dependent on
> the hardware.  The 500Gb Maxtor that just failed for me was about 11 hours to
> check it all.

That is to complicate things. Just let the fsck do the badblock test
and mark the bad one. Use the -c parameter for a read test and -cc for
a non-destructive read-write test and add -k to keep the blocks
already marked bad.

> I have now zeroed the bootable flag on it using fdisk, so I can re-install the
> card and drive, and will see if its salvageable in the next day or so.
>

What do the boot flag got to do with installing anything? If i
remember right the boot flag is used by DOS/windows to mark with
partition to boot from and i don't think any new OS today care about
it.

/ Jonas