Input/output error - is the disc bad?

[Craig Hagerman]

Hi,

I decided to move the data from one hard drive onto a new, much larger
drive. I first just simply used cp (cp -a olddir newdir). But I found a
dozen or so errors all the same complaining about an input/output error. I
tried rsync but it gave the same errors. I unmounted the disc and ran fsck.
Then, in order to see what exactly is different I did a comparison like
this:

cd /media/OLD
find . -type f -not -exec cmp {} /media/NEW/{} ";" -print

It too gave me a bunch of input/output errors. Fsck found a couple problems
with inode numbers or something like that but didn't report anything major.
But it seems impossible to copy these files or even read them. One is a
documentary movie. I tried to watch it in mplayer and it seemed to play
fine, but as I fast forwarded through it, it eventually came to a spot where
it just froze up for a couple minutes and then quit. I thought I had watched
this video before and it was OK, but I am not 100% sure.

Any suggestions for how to successfully copy the dozen or so files that have
the read error? Those files are not all THAT important, and I wouldn't care
too much if I lost them. What I do care about is if the drive is bad or not.
I was going to reuse it. Other than fsck how else can I check a (SATA) disc?
How can I know if it is bad or not, or how I can I fix any problems so that
I won't lose data again in the future?

Craig
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