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

[Michael Hirsch]

On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 12:46 PM, Steven Vollom
<stevenvollom at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> I found out  something important yesterday.  Because I am an artist, I
> have been using only the right side of my brain for over 60 years.  I am
> not easily capable of understand a logical thing, unless it is visual or
> explained in those terms.

Steve, don't put yourself down so much.  You are doing fine.

The reason you are having such trouble is, I believe, that you are
really diving in and tying to do some pretty tricky things.  You are
asking relatively deep and expert questions before you've really
learned your way around.  That's a GOOD thing, not bad at all, but it
does mean that many of the answers will be hard to understand until
you've absorbed more of the Unix way of thinking.

For instance, you're doing things with partitions that beginners
aren't expected to do.  You're trying to convert a file format
(postscript) that most people don't even know exists.  So when you ask
these tougher questions you get deeper answers.  The responder assumes
that you are fairly comfortable with the command line.  We might even
assume that you know about the "unix way" and can use pipes and I/O
redirection to feed the output of one command line program to the
input of another.

So keep asking those questions and we'll keep answering them.  Be
aware that the answers may lead you to places you haven't been before.
 If you want to be proactive, start reading any of the dozens
(hundreds?  thousands?) of linux tutorials.  For instance,
http://linuxcommand.org/learning_the_shell.php looks useful, but there
are many out there all discoverable with a simple google search.

Another useful and very fun read is to browse the jargon file:
http://catb.org/jargon/html/index.html  The jargon file is a wonderful
and opinionated write-up of hacker culture.  I particularly like to
browse the glossary http://catb.org/jargon/html/go01.html  I pick one
word then follow links and always learn a lot.

Keep up the good work.

Michael