Incorrect parameters can cause irreparable damage to the filesystem. This ensures that the proper parameters are passed to the badblocks program. This can happen if the drive hardware cannot remap the bad sector for any reason such as its spare sector pool has been exhausted.Īlthough the badblocks program can be used to search for bad blocks (sectors) on a disk partition on Linux systems, I recommend you use e2fsck -c instead or the appropriate fsck variant for the filesystem you are using. This tool does not mark individual sectors bad it marks the entire cluster as bad in the MFT or FAT and relocates the entire cluster to another unused cluster on the drive. If it is not a system drive, the scan should begin immediately unless another process has already locked it for exclusive access. No matter which one you choose, if you are scanning a system or boot drive, it will require exclusive access to the volume and ask you if you want to schedule the scan on the next restart.
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It can be accessed by opening Windows Explorer > right-click the drive to check > Properties > Tools tab > Check now... > check "Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors" > Start. Windows also has a GUI tool that can be used to perform the same checks. The difference between the two commands is the second one will re-evaluate sectors that are already flagged by the operating system as bad. Depending on the size of the volume in question and the number of directories and files, it can take quite some time to complete. It will run other tests first to verify the consistency of the drive's metadata before the optional bad sector pass. A similar process is used by other modern operating systems.įor those who are not afraid of the Windows command line, chkdsk /r or chkdsk /b can be run at any time to look for bad sectors. For example, Windows maintains a "dirty bit" in the Master File Table (MFT) on NTFS volumes or the File Allocation Table (FAT) on FAT16/32 drives.ĭuring boot, the autochk program looks for this value and if it is set, it will run an abbreviated version of the actions performed by chkdsk on all volumes flagged. Some are automatically invoked during startup if the computer detects an improper shutdown.
This is especially important for those utilities that bypass operating system protections and directly access the drive which is exactly what many of these tools do.Įvery operating system has tools to scan a disk for bad sectors. Manufacturer and third-party tools may be just as catastrophic as operating system utilities. This means it is possible to lose portions of data files or metadata that is used to locate files and directories on the volume. In this conclusion to that discussion, we will look at the tools available from the operating system, drive manufacturers, and other third parties you can use to manage and monitor your drives to keep them as healthy as possible.ĭisclaimer: Before running any of the commands in this article, make sure you have a good backup of the drive since attempts to repair bad sectors may result in corruption of the file system.
Part 1 of this article looked at drive hardware and how the controller works behind the scenes to detect and resolve issues with bad sectors it detects during normal operation.