HomePage of Laszlo SZATHMARY | Linux / Discover and mark bad blocks

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Intro

I bought a second-hand laptop which works great. There is only one problem: it seems that its hard drive has some bad blocks. How to treat this problem?

What I tried first

My favorite Linux distro is Ubuntu so it was clear what to install on it. I booted the live CD and started the installation. I made 3 partitions: one for the system (/), one for swapping, and one for data (mainly for movies). The live version of Ubuntu indicated that there are some problems with the hard drive but I didn't want to believe it. Unfortunately the installations were not successful though I tried 3 times with different Ubuntu versions. It never reached the 100% :(

Solution

Using the live CD, with gparted I made one partition only, an ext3. Then the following command identified and marked the bad blocks:

sudo fsck -pcfv /dev/sda1

(I read this tip at http://www.overclock.net/linux-unix/588130-ubuntu-9-10-failing-hard-disk.html). Be prepared that it takes lots of time, it finished with my 40GB drive in 6 hours. But then the partition was "OK", I could install Ubuntu and after one week of intensive testing it still works perfectly. Of course, I won't use this hard drive for production, I will only store multimedia stuff on it.

Since fsck cannot analyse a swap partition, I chose to create one partition only. After installing the system I created a swap file. The only drawback is that Ubuntu cannot do hibernation on a swap file, this functionality requires a swap partition.