Bad blocks in HDD

[Ioannis Vranos]

Marius Gedminas wrote:
> 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.


Perhaps e2fsck creates the bad block inode, the first time a bad blocks checking is run?




-- 
Ioannis A. Vranos

C95 / C++03 Developer

http://www.cpp-software.net