If you happen to have a Linux filesystem on the drive, you can check for filesystem errors and run badblocks at the same time.įirst, get the list of all the drives and their partitions:Īgain, /dev/sdx is the hard drive you want to scan. Note that this will overwrite all data on the drive and wipe out all the partitions, as well. It does this 4 times, using the patterns 0xaa, 0x55, 0xff, and 0x00 (alternating 0's and 1's, then all 1's, then all 0's). The -w option tells badblocks to write a known pattern, then read back the data to make sure it matches the pattern. If you don't care about the data, you can do this instead, to do a more thorough scan: This will perform a non-destructive read/write test on the disk without doing a filesystem check. Taking it out is probably not that hard, which will save you a bunch of service charges including replacing the drive if necessary.Use sudo fdisk -l to list all the drives and their partitions. If you can't take the hard drive out yourself and examine it by plugging it into another computer, you should take it to someone who can. Running badblocks in that case can work but take a very long time, because it can fall pray to uninterruptible sleep too when it finds the bad blocks if it comes out of this and logs the blocks successfully, the disk can be used, but if you reformat again that bad blocks list is gone too. This is due to disk read failures, which will be reported in syslog. On linux, this can manifest itself at first as sudden system freezes due to processes falling into uninterruptible sleep, meaning they cannot be stopped and the kernel keeps spinning its wheels trying to handle them, maxing out the processor.

If badblocks ran for that long, it is probably because of serious hardware failure. Hard disks do not have an unlimited life span, and it is not possible to predict exactly what it will be. Please help me so that I can use Windows on my laptop.īut it has completed 106 hrs till now and still continue. sudo badblocks -v /dev/sdaīut it has been running for 106 hours, and still continues. overall assessment-disk failure is imminent(backup all data and replace the disk) The following points are being shown: -smart status: disk failure is imminent In the Ubuntu disk utility, I see all HDDs as unallocated free space. I also installed Ubuntu as logical drive (deleted all HDD partitions) and then tried to install Windows but in the middle of the installation process (after expanding Windows files) it showed an error and stopped. Then I tried after formatting and for once it became possible. I had Windows installed on my laptop and suddenly one morning Windows couldn't start.

Hdat2 bad sector