bad blocks

[Brett Worth]

On Tue, 19 Feb 2002, Antony Stace wrote:

> > And if you're looking for bad blocks and are not just wanting to check the
> > filesystem (?) integrity then use "dd".  e.g. 
> > 
> > 	dd if=/dev/hda2 of=/dev/null bs=256k conv=noerror
> 
> This sounds like what I want.  I want to see if the disk has physical errors.  I
> do not want to destory the data on the partition at the moment.  Will this command
> be ok to run once I have unmounted the partition? ie it will not delete any data?

Yes.  You can just run this on an unmounted partition.  It just reads
blocks directly from the device and writes to /dev/null.

if = input file
of = output file 
bs = block size
conv=noerror means dont stop when you hit an error.

"man dd" is worth a look.  It can even do EBCDIC <> ASCII conversion!
-- 
Brett

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