Bad blocks in HDD

[Marius Gedminas]

On Wed, May 06, 2009 at 12:40:46AM +0300, Ioannis Vranos wrote:
> I checked for bad blocks one unmounted ext3 partition, by using the
> Live CD of Ubuntu 9.04 x64, with the following command:
> 
> root at ubuntu:~# e2fsck -c -c -f -v -y /dev/sda1
> e2fsck 1.41.4 (27-Jan-2009)
> Checking for bad blocks (non-destructive read-write test)
> Testing with random pattern: done
> /dev/sda1: Updating bad block inode.
...
> /dev/sda1: ***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****
...
>         0 bad blocks
...
> Question: What does the message "/dev/sda1: ***** FILE SYSTEM WAS
> MODIFIED *****" of the first check mean?

A very good question.  Looking at the output again I see

  /dev/sda1: Updating bad block inode.

which is probably what happened.  The bad block inode, in case you don't
know, is like an invisible file that has all the bad blocks allocated to
it so the filesystem wouldn't try to allocate those for real files.

Why did it update the bad block inode when there were no bad blocks
found, I don't know.

> Did it find bad blocks?

No, see the

          0 bad blocks

message it prints.

Marius Gedminas
-- 
Anything can be made to work if you fiddle with it long enough.
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