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badblocks – Find bad blocks on disk

The badblocks command is a Linux utility used to search for bad blocks on a storage device. It can be used to test a hard drive or any other block device for bad sectors or blocks. The command writes a series of patterns to the device and then reads them back to detect any errors.

Overview

The basic syntax for the badblocks command is:

badblocks [options] device

Where device is the path to the device you want to test.

By default, badblocks will perform a read-only test on the device, which means it won’t write anything to the device. This is useful for checking if a device already has bad blocks. However, you can also perform a read-write test on the device using the -w option. This will write a series of patterns to the device and then read them back to detect any errors.

Here’s an example of how to use badblocks to test a hard drive:

badblocks -w /dev/sda

This will perform a read-write test on the /dev/sda device. Note that this can take a long time, especially on larger drives.

You can also specify a range of blocks to test using the -b option. For example, to test only blocks 1000 to 2000, you can use:

badblocks -w -b 1000 2000 /dev/sda

By default, badblocks will output the results to the terminal. However, you can also save the results to a file using the -o option. For example:

badblocks -w -o badblocks.txt /dev/sda

This will save the results to a file named badblocks.txt in the current directory.

Options

Here’s a table of all the available options for the badblocks command:

Option Description
-b Specifies the block range to test
-c Specifies the number of blocks to test at once
-o Saves the results to a file
-w Performs a read-write test on the device
-s Shows progress of the test
-v Verbose output

Troubleshooting Tips

  • If you get an error message saying that the device is busy, make sure that no other programs are accessing the device.
  • If the test takes a long time, be patient. It can take several hours to test a large hard drive.
  • If you suspect that your hard drive has bad blocks, it’s a good idea to back up your data before running badblocks. The test can sometimes cause data loss.

Notes

  • badblocks should not be used on mounted devices or devices that contain important data.
  • If you’re not sure which device to test, you can use the lsblk command to list all the available block devices on your system.

Related commands