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What to do about a badblock problem?

rated 0 times [ 2] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 2726 / 1 Year ago, tue, february 28, 2023, 12:31:04

I tried to copy a large file from one partition to another and got a read error, so I ran badblocks. It reported somewhere around 250 bad blocks, if I remember correctly. My first reaction was "Oh, guess I need a new hard drive", but it's not my boot partition, and the system is running just fine. It is, however, the same physical device as my boot drive.

There's nothing life shattering if I lose it, but it'd be an annoyance.
I figure this is either a pretty ominous sign that the drive will utterly fail soon, or that I just need to run something to move the data and mark those blocks out?

What command or app would best help me further diagnose / fix the problem?

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ellter

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2 Years ago

answered 1 Year ago atchcommo · Accepted Answer

If your concerned about your HD the run disk utility you can find it in the dash.

Click on the button to check the disk and allow it to run all tests, it can take a long time, 30+ minutes is reasonable.

At the end of the tests it should tell you if you hard disk is failing. Not sure if 250 bad blocks is critical, it may be that that part of the disk is just at the end of it's write life, the rest of the disk may be fine, see what the disk utility tells you for the best idea.

Here are some screen shots to help you out.

enter image description here

First select your hard disk from the tree on the left and then you will see the info on the disk. The area circled is the overview of the disk that is made just by it running, first look to see if you have the green light and it says the disk is healthy. Then you can click on the SMARTData button and it will give you detailed info.

enter image description here

The lower part of the window gives you the running info that is used to determine if the disk is healthy, any bad part will give you a red light. The rest of the window is rather self explanatory but if you click on the Run Self-test button it will give you the option to run the disk check. When you click on it a window will pop up asking you what kind of test to run. Selecting the Extended test will run the full test. As I said earlier expect it to take 30+ minutes, it will give you a running commentary on what it is doing but it is not that exciting to watch.

While it is possible to use the computer while it it working it will slow down the tests and all your programs will start much slower, browsing the internet should not be a problem as long as you are not using the offline cache, i.e. use a private browsing window so that the web pages are only stored in your RAM. This may not be possible if you have a weak processor or very limited RAM without slowing down the computer.

After you let the test run you should see the results and if it tell you the disk is failing you might want to get a new disk and clone your old one. There are many questions here on how to make a complete copy of your hard disk so just do a search and see which ones seem the most helpful to you; I will not get into it here as I only know how to do it in theory from reading the answer on askubuntu.

Incidentally as you can see on the second screenshot there is a box that you can check to stop the disk utility from notifying you that the disk is failing if you leave that unchecked it will give you a notice that "Disk failure is imminent" if it see some critical problem, I'm not sure when it will do this, I think during the boot process, I've not had that unfortunate message come up yet.