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

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 20 November 2008, 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.
>
>> 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

The os's don't, but the bios still does.  The ASUS bios is, IMO, buggier than 
a 10 day old carcass.

In this case, if I plug the JMicron pata card back in, and the bootable flag 
is set on that drive, that bios automatically wants to boot from it before 
looking for another bootable partition on the main board interface.  And that 
VERY effectively stops the boot when it gets as far as printing "GRUB" on the 
cleared screen, 30 seconds later the drive led goes off and the only response 
is to the hardware reset button.

Yeah, buggy bios, and its the latest one that will boot.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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