badblocks is a Free software to check for bad sectors on a disk drive. It
creates a list of these sectors that can be used with other programs, like
mkfs, so that they are not used in the future and thus do not cause corruption
of data. It is part of the e2fsprogs project.
It will help you to check your drive periodically for bad
blocks. It will list out all bad blocks. This list can be fed to fsck to be
recorded in the filesystem data structures so that the operating system won’t
try to use the bad blocks for storing data. The following example will show how
this could be done.
Open a terminal, type
following command:
$ sudo badblocks
-v /dev/hda1 > bad-blocks
The above command will generate the file bad-blocks in the
current directory from where you are running this command.
Now, you can pass this file to the fsck command to record
these bad blocks
$ sudo fsck -t
ext4 -l bad-blocks /dev/hda1
Pass 1: Checking
inodes, blocks, and sizes
Pass 2: Checking
directory structure
Pass 3: Checking
directory connectivity
Pass 4: Check
reference counts.
Pass 5: Checking
group summary information.
/dev/hda1: *****
FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****
/dev/hda1: 25/360
files, 44/1440 blocks
If you have already used badblocks , e2fsck
will try to move the block to another place. If the block was really bad, not
just marginal, the contents of the file may be corrupted.
Looks at badblocks man pages for more command line options.
