bad block/superblock on new disk?

[Liam Proven]

On Sat, 23 May 2020 at 16:08, M. Fioretti <mfioretti at nexaima.net> wrote:
>
> yes, of course I did.

Phew!

I mean, I know you've been experimenting with having both an HD and an
SSD in a Thinkpad, in which case, one would be sda and one would be
sdb... and presumably, your external drive would be sdc and you'd have
just tried to nuke one of your internal drives! And Linux being Linux,
if you are root, it will let you.

> 15 years ago life was simpler, and by this I simply mean that besides
> having more spare time, my daily job implied playing daily with
> hardware at this, if not much lower level, so everything we are
> mentioning today was daily refreshed in my mind. Today, if I may say
> so myself, my average level of linux/foss knowledge is higher than 15
> years ago, but more focused in other sectors.
>
> But regardless of that: yes, OF COURSE I did some googling before
> attaching that drive, exactly because of what I just wrote. And what I
> got from several sources when looking up how to format and label a NEW
> drive just in from the factory, from a linux/ubuntu prompt:
>
> 1) is ONLY AND EXACTLY what I reported here, i.e. "use mkfs etcc and
>    then e2label, that's it"

Nope.

It is possible to directly make a filesystem on a RAID, or on a floppy
diskette or other removable media -- although not recommended -- but
on a hard disk, AFAIK you *need* to partition it first.

I recently created my first ever real ZFS ZRAID array and I still
needed to write a GUID disklabel to each physical drive first.

> 2) again: on several sources, because I would never risk to fry
>    hardware typing random instructions from the first bozo found on
>    the web, and I usually know how to filter obviously bogus ones.

You seem to have missed the part about partitioning, then!

The sequence is:

[0] Look if the drive is partitioned (e.g. `sfdisk -l`); if it is,
remove any Windows partitions first
[1] Ensure there is a partition table (e.g. with `fdisk` and the `o` command)
[2] Make a Linux partition (e.g. with `fdisk` or Gparted)
[3] *then* and only then format the partition with the desired filesystem

You tried to skip straight to step 3 when 1/2 are _necessary_.

But from your other post, I think the drive is dead.

Sadly, 2/6 of the last half a dozen new hard disks I've bought failed
within a month or 2. :-(

> 2) and afaict those two commands worked without an itch on another
>    drive, just three days ago,

Not on an unpartitioned drive, no. Perhaps if you reformatted an
existing (Windows?) partition?

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