Questions tagged [bad-blocks]

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Do I have a bad SSD? Bad block count at 257

I have Adata su650 480GB SSD which is generally working fine. Recent check of SMART values using CrystalDiskInfo reports 257 bad block count. Now I need to know a few things with respect to this ...
mmp's user avatar
  • 177
0 votes
1 answer
92 views

Check for previously found badblocks on a drive without re-running all of badblocks?

I ran badblocks on a couple of drives for 48 hours. One drive had lots of badblocks whereas the other was clean. I then physically took out the drives from the computer and accidentally mixed them up. ...
Baz's user avatar
  • 101
1 vote
1 answer
191 views

Finding files on a RAID5 ext4 filesystem associated to bad blocks on one HDD

I am running a NAS with Openmediavault 5 and I have set up a RAID5 (with mdadm) with 3x 5TB WD Red harddisks back in the day (see details below for mdadm output). I am using the whole disk as member ...
bash0r1988's user avatar
0 votes
0 answers
286 views

Testing a harddrive using badblocks and gsmartcontrol

Description: To test the health of an empty Western Digital 1TB SATA disk I found in the dumpster, I ran sudo badblocks -svw /dev/sdb > badblocks.txt on it in Ubuntu 20.04. It ran for approx. >...
Christopher.L's user avatar
0 votes
0 answers
227 views

Reallocated sector count & Secure Erase

I have a retired HDD with a high "Reallocated Sector Count" (maybe greater a thousand, if I remember correctly). Today, I performed a ATA Secure Erase via hdparm, and after that, this count ...
Yai0Phah's user avatar
  • 123
8 votes
1 answer
3k views

Why was my microSD card fixed after formatting?

I'm sure that they were not file system errors: reading it at the block level (pv /dev/sdb > /dev/null) gave a really low 1.4 MB/s and then at some point it stopped with "input/output" ...
golimar's user avatar
  • 1,498
0 votes
2 answers
177 views

solid state disk some random files corrupted; how to prevent in simple terms

Please see What happens in a raid (5) when one drive or more gets a bad sector?. I have a few .jpg files (and much more serious data). Some of the .jpg files become corrupted. I can tell because ...
William Garber's user avatar
1 vote
1 answer
462 views

Does the information about bad sectors provided by S.M.A.R.T. and badblocks survive formatting? [closed]

I have read many questions and answers on SuperUser, ServerFault, and other websites about this topic, but I am still a little bit confused about S.M.A.R.T. and badblocks. I saw that S.M.A.R.T. stores ...
optical's user avatar
  • 123
0 votes
1 answer
81 views

Is this HDD damaged?

I bought a 3.5-inch Toshiba HDWQ140 server class (N300) 4 TB drive on Amazon. I followed instructions to put it into service as the primary storage disk in my 6-year-old TiVo Bolt DVR. I succeeded in ...
iXod's user avatar
  • 11
0 votes
3 answers
284 views

To seperate one badblocks test on entire drive to multiple tests, Is that good idea to create temp partitions and test on them?

I would like to run badblocks on one entire hard drive (8TB). For example: $ sudo badblocks -wsv /dev/sdb But, this will take days to complete. For some reasons, I can not leave the test PC on for ...
sgon00's user avatar
  • 525
1 vote
1 answer
122 views

Is `badblocks` meaningful on compact flash cards?

I own ten (10) compact flash cards. The cards are industrial high quality ones. Because of some random system crashes I checked all 10 cards using badblocks: sudo badblocks -w -s -o badblocks-card1....
eDeviser's user avatar
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2 votes
2 answers
134 views

re-use of hdd which was wiped, but can not accessed for any further use

I have an HDD which was wiped (not by myself).Maybe a program named killdisk was used. I want to re-use the HDD, but it seems to be "really deleted". I don't want any old data from the hdd. ...
Stefan's user avatar
  • 21
2 votes
1 answer
5k views

What Runtime_Bad_Block mean in SMART Attributes? How critical is it?

My SSD has the following SMART Attribute Pre-fail. What does that mean and how critical is it? 183 Runtime_Bad_Block 0x0013 098 001 010 Pre-fail Always In_the_past 60
Fractale's user avatar
  • 609
1 vote
1 answer
156 views

Does badblocks have a ramp when there are no errors?

Before I added a replacement drive to an array, I executed this script to make sure I didn't need to send the replacement back to the manufacturer: date badblocks -b 4096 -c 4096 /dev/sdd date hdparm -...
Jeff Holt's user avatar
  • 113
1 vote
1 answer
245 views

usb stick's broken after badblock with -w option

I have two usb sticks with 8Gb and 128Gb size. For different reasons, I pass badblocks with -svw option, and now both sticks are totally damaged. Every time I want to write on it I have the same error:...
Mario Castilla's user avatar
3 votes
2 answers
1k views

What is the difference between a bad block and a bad sector?

In a couple of resources I encountered the terms "bad sector" and "bad block" when referring to corrupted areas at hard disks, which do not seem to be very different. I thought ...
RobertS - Reinstate Monica's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
773 views

Was my HDD with failed SMART really repaired?

In brief: I want to know if an HDD with failed SMART can be repaired by any means, and if so, is it still reliable enough. In details: I have a 4 years old 1TB Western Digital HDD (WD10JPVX-08JC3T6) ...
Beleg's user avatar
  • 123
4 votes
2 answers
4k views

Do bad clusters on modern (as of 2020) SSD indicate hardware failure?

I've got a Samsung 970 Evo 2TB SSD that has been working perfectly for a year and a half, under a mostly-read load. Recently, while updating Windows to the 2004 release, the OS got stuck in the ...
Therac's user avatar
  • 177
0 votes
1 answer
84 views

How to recover soft bad sectors

How to get rid of soft bad sectors obtained from cloning a faulty disc? I have a EFI HDD with some bad sectors from a DELL computer. It's been causing headache for quite some time. So want to replace ...
gev kavorg's user avatar
1 vote
3 answers
5k views

Strange HDDSCAN results, consecutive bad blocks

I'm doing VR-Verify; All bads are consecutive, starting at around ~20-22%, and the percentage hasn't moved for the whole duration of bad blocks. HDD was quite slow lately, especially on boot, could ...
Ivan Zhoga's user avatar
1 vote
1 answer
376 views

How likely is the last block of a drive to be a bad sector?

This is a follow-up question to this one, where zeroing the disk with dd would give me an error towards the very end of the drive. I then set about trying to determine whether this was a bad sector, ...
Hashim Aziz's user avatar
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1 vote
1 answer
4k views

badblocks is taking ages - what am I doing wrong?

I have a 8TB Seagate Archive drive which has a few bad sectors. I can't afford to replace it yet, though. I'm trying to "fix it" with badblocks for the time being, but it's taking ages: # badblocks -...
stevereds's user avatar
  • 115
1 vote
2 answers
3k views

How to scan boot/system drive for bad sectors on Ubuntu machine?

My workstation, an Ubuntu v14.04 (Trusty) machine, has two system boot options. I can run Windows (for protools and music recording), but more often I boot up into Ubuntu for software development work....
S. Imp's user avatar
  • 111
2 votes
1 answer
570 views

How to emulate disk partition bad blocks in a test file?

I would like to test some disk rescue methods before applying them in real life, in particular the ability for ddrescue to restore bad blocks from several disk copies, assuming one bad block is not ...
lalebarde's user avatar
  • 705
1 vote
1 answer
6k views

How many bad blocks in a HDD is too many?

I am at my second attempt to get a brand new undamaged HDD (the first attempt yielded a question already) but I am starting to lose hope. The new drive I got is S.M.A.R.T. healthy but has a lot of bad ...
Paiku Han's user avatar
  • 179
1 vote
0 answers
43 views

Strange data corruption on HDD after switching from Windows to Linux

After I have replaced Windows 10 (the laptop has been in use for some time witout any issues) with Kubuntu Cosmic (ext4 over lvm, kernel 4.18.0-16-generic) on a laptop, I have started experiencing a ...
KOLANICH's user avatar
  • 111
0 votes
1 answer
2k views

How does mkfs -c works

I have faulty 3 Tb drive. There's a lot of bad blocks, but it's still has about 2.6 Tb usable space and I'd like to utilize it for trash storage (music, videos, etc.) At first I came across some guy's ...
agp22888's user avatar
0 votes
1 answer
682 views

HDD SMART test shows read error; should I toss the disk or scan for bad blocks?

After triggering SMART test (long) using smartctl, I have the following smartctl -a output: smartctl 6.5 2016-01-24 r4214 [x86_64-linux-4.4.0-142-generic] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-16, Bruce ...
rayless fish's user avatar
0 votes
1 answer
833 views

How can I attempt to read bad sectors from the end of the disk, using ddrescue?

How can I attempt to read bad sectors from the end of the disk, using ddrescue? I have dynamic volumes and the LDR is kept at the end of the disk, unlike MBR. I remember that I've tried --reverse but ...
Nick's user avatar
  • 293
1 vote
1 answer
929 views

How to add a sector to the list of badblocks for ext4?

dumpe2fs -b /dev/sdd1 can dump blocks that are known to be bad by ext4. How do I manually add a block to that list without redoing mkfs ?
Benoit-Pierre DEMAINE's user avatar
1 vote
2 answers
4k views

Checking a new disk for bad blocks on Linux, does read-only make sense?

When I issue the following command sudo badblocks -vs -b 4096 -o badsectors2.txt /dev/sdc1 I get as a response Checking blocks 0 to 1152784944 Checking for bad blocks (read-only test): 72.37% done,...
Daniel F's user avatar
  • 983
1 vote
2 answers
538 views

Detecting bad blocks/ sectors on modern (spinning) drives and script to monitor SMART info

I'm currently scanning a number of old drives to detect errors. If you google detecting bad sectors on a mechanical spinning disk (rather than ssd) you'll usually come across: windows chkdsk/r ...
beardedfool's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
2k views

How to interpret S.M.A.R.T and Badblocks results

I have bought a used SSHD ( Seagate Laptop SSHD - ST500LM000-1EJ162 ) on ebay. Regarding to S.M.A.R.T the disk might be damaged somehow, I am not sure. To correctly interpret the S.M.A.R.T values, I ...
AlexOnLinux's user avatar
0 votes
1 answer
2k views

I can't change SATA hard disk (working in UDMA) to PIO mode in Linux

I'm trying to disable DMA in my SATA 3.5" hard disk drive to work in PIO mode because for recovering some bad sectors from a failing disk with GNU ddrescue I am using PartedMagic Linux live CD and I ...
NullPointer666's user avatar
1 vote
1 answer
2k views

ZFS scrub finds checksum errors, but badblocks and smartctl do not

I have configured a ZFS pool with two drives as a mirror. The operating system is Ubuntu 16.04 and I have been using the zfs 0.6.5 as packaged by the vendor. The drives are 3T WD Green and 3T WD Red (...
taneli's user avatar
  • 121
-1 votes
2 answers
818 views

Badblocks reports "weird value (4294967295) in do_write" when writing patterns

This is the second time that I'm receiving this error running badblocks, approximately 2 years apart from the last time, and the vast majority of factors from hardware (cables, etc.) to software (the ...
Hashim Aziz's user avatar
  • 11.6k
4 votes
1 answer
2k views

How to start badblocks at a specified portion of the drive

While trying to dd the last few blocks of a 200GB Maxtor IDE hard drive, I run into the following error: $ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=4M status=progress 203901894656 bytes (204 GB, 190 GiB) ...
Hashim Aziz's user avatar
  • 11.6k
2 votes
1 answer
464 views

partclone via clonezilla - where are the bad blocks logged?

I've just backed up a partition using clonezilla, which in turn employed partclone. During the backup, several blocks were bad and were skipped (it was in rescue mode). Is there a log of these?
ein supports Moderator Strike's user avatar
19 votes
1 answer
22k views

How to test SSDs or NVMe for badblocks'?

With the traditional spinning disks diagnostics is rather easy. If you suspect a drive to be faulty, you can check the SMART values, run a SMART extended test and a badblocks -wsv test. If all three ...
masgo's user avatar
  • 2,184
140 votes
16 answers
28k views

How can I intentionally break/corrupt a sector on an SD card?

I need to test the resilience of some read/write code for some embedded hardware. How might I sacrifice a few SD cards and break several known sectors for a controlled study? The only thing I can ...
Gabe Krause's user avatar
  • 1,309
1 vote
2 answers
6k views

ext4 filesystem still has errors after fsck

Suddenly my ext4 file system fell down into read-only mode. I've unmounted this disk and tried to repair it, but without any success. fsck tries to fix something but ends with FILE SYSTEM WAS ...
mangup's user avatar
  • 11
0 votes
2 answers
935 views

How to know if bad block is logical or physical?

I cannot read some files from external disk (NTFS system). Windows cannot read from this disk now. I am just scanning the disk using badblocks (Linux). The program prints a lot of bad blocks. I ...
Peter's user avatar
  • 1
0 votes
1 answer
2k views

Badblocks and fsck say HDD is clean but Linux marks it as read-only

I'm relatively new to Linux so I'm not sure why this is happening. I have this one drive that Linux always marks it as read-only partition. At first I thought it was just the OS so I did a clean ...
shant1993's user avatar
-1 votes
1 answer
875 views

What is AdBlock blocking on my website?

While reading my webpage I noticed that AdBlock was blocking one element. I certainly don't have any ads. Here's the entire source: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>...
MD XF's user avatar
  • 224
0 votes
0 answers
2k views

mkfs.ext4 and mkfs.vfat with same badblock file give me different space

I have a 256GB pendrive with bad sectors, and I get them with this command: sudo badblocks -wsvf -o 256GB.txt /dev/sdc But when I use this file (256GB.txt) to format the pendrive I get different ...
santos82h's user avatar
  • 101
1 vote
2 answers
332 views

SMART: Is my HDD about to get bad sectors and corrupted data?

I am running gsmartcontrol in Linux. I ran an extended SMART test. The Health Self-Assessment test returned a value of 'PASSED'. However I am concerned about the possibility of any bad sectors and ...
user138072's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
3k views

How do you securely erase remapped bad sectors on HDD in Linux?

I have run badblocks on my HDD in Linux. No badblocks were found. However some bad sectors may have been previously detected and remapped; if this is the case, the badblocks test would not have found ...
user138072's user avatar
1 vote
1 answer
551 views

How long would badblocks take on a 40GB disk? How do I optimize the whole procedure?

I am running badblocks on a 40GB partition checking for errors.It hasn't responded for hours now! Went through some answers related to this and someone suggested to increase the -c parameter's value ...
amrit bhat's user avatar
-2 votes
1 answer
5k views

How do Zero-Fill, Full Format, and CHKDSK fix bad sectors?

I use HD Tune pro error scan to find problems with mechanical hard drives. However, I am confused as to weather these are fixable problems or not. Please clarify weather my statements are accurate: ...
cloneman's user avatar
  • 1,076
0 votes
1 answer
349 views

Writing to bad sector makes every other operation fail afterwards

My hard drive has a few bad blocks, so I'm trying to get a list of them all in order to bypass them when creating a new ext4 filesystem, like this: badblocks -wsv -o badblocks_sdf.txt /dev/sdf As ...
Jelle De Loecker's user avatar