On 04/16/2015 12:31 PM, ken wrote:
... remembering that partitioning also detects and marks bad blocks, I was then wondering if this was done also by the writing of LUKS container alone.
It is my understanding that the drive firmware is where "bad blocks" are detected and marked. I expect that the details are very complex and proprietary, involving checksums, error-correcting codes, encryption, spare blocks, internal persistent data structures, etc..
From a user's point of view, the most obvious symptoms of a bad block are the computer hangs, the HDD LED is on steadily, and/or the hard drive makes an audible "click of death".
Partitioning, LUKS formatting, and file system formatting only write to a fraction of all addressable blocks, and thus are unlikely to find a single bad block out of millions (1 GB drive) or billions (1 TB drive). An exhaustive read or write of all addressable blocks is more likely to find bad blocks (e.g. scanning, wiping, shredding).
Manufacturer diagnostics can dig deeper and deal with problems found. For example:
http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/
David