problem cleaning up old drive

[Hakan Koseoglu]

Hi Nepal,
nepal google said the following on 21/11/08 17:53:
> This is so embedded in my brain! years ago with dos I would 
> have typed in g=c800:5 which would have run a low level 
> format from the disk bios itself and checked for bad 
> sectors and marked them. Something like that. Is that what 
> dban does, or does it just erase at a low level so no data 
> can be retrieved? It is not data security I am concerned 
> with, just reusing the disk if it is still operable, if all 
> the errors are because it is quietly crumbling apart I 
> would like to know and then dump it.

Mkfs.ext3 can do such checks with the parameter -c. If you specify this twice, it will do a read/write test (will take longer).

If you don't want to create a file system, you can always use badblocks directly. See the details of possible parameters in the man page.

I always find it easier with mkfs.ext3, I suppose it is just something I got used to since I tend to create filesystems this method all the time.