I'm running badblocks -vws /dev/sda
on a new 80GB laptop drive to make sure the disk is good. So far it's completed 2 passes and is working on it's third.
How many passes does it normally make?
If the only flags you ran the command with were -v
, -w
and -s
, then it should have exited after the first pass. Seeing as you're performing a with-write test, it should be safe to ^C
out of anytime.
-t
and -p
options. See my answer.
May 5, 2015 at 7:40
What you're seeing is not multiple passes, it's multiple test patterns within a single pass. The -w
option runs a single pass by default, and you can specify additional passes with the -p
option.
However, a single pass with the -w
option tests four different patterns: 0xaa
, 0x55
, 0xff
, 0x00
.
You can override this with the -t
option, to specifiy your own test pattern(s). E.g. to test only a single pattern you could do something like this:
badblocks -vwst 0x00 /dev/sda