Badblocks

Badblocks is a tool for detecting bad blocks in your hard disk.

Usage

The following will write to every block and read back to identify the number of bad blocks.

This is a destructive test. ETA is approximately 1 day per 4 terabytes.

badblocks -wsv -b 4096 /dev/sdg

• -w do a destructive write test
• -s show progress
• -v verbose
• -b num block size. Use 4096 typically.
• -p num do num iterations. Typically 1 is sufficient.
• -t test_pattern Test pattern. Select from [random,

To save the list of bad blocks, you need to run e2fsck or mkfs.ext4:

sudo e2fsck -fcck /dev/device

• -f force check
• -cc non-destructive write test
• -k add bad blocks to bad blocks list

mkfs.ext4 -cc /dev/device

Resources

• Archwiki: Badblocks