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Re: About USB hard drives and errors



On 2010-04-10 02:20, Clive McBarton wrote:

Paul E Condon wrote:>
dumpe2fs -b <device> is supposed to print the bad blocks that have
been marked on a device. When I run it, it prints nothing. I find it
hard to believe that a 500GB HD contains ZERO bad blocks.

Every HD that is even remotely close to being usable will always have
zero bad blocks when seen from outside the HD. All HDs have error
recognition and error correction and automatic replacement of faulty
sectors with spare ones. A HD will only show bad blocks after all of its
remapping area is used, at which point it is far beyond being usable.

In other words, scanning for bad blocks on a HD cannot work.

You can see the internal count of the remapped sectors with SMART, as
others have already pointed out here.

Interesting. So what is /badblocks/ for, and should it be removed in order to remove useless complexity?

--
Dissent is patriotic, remember?


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