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

[Steven Vollom]

Jonas Norlander wrote:
> 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.
>   
Jonas,  I don't know how to properly use the Shell.  I am studying it as 
we speak.  I have a pretty good idea of what badblocks are now, but 
wouldn't know how to mark them.  Steven
>   
>> 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.
>   
I did not write the statement you are answering and don't understand it.
Steven
> / Jonas
>
>