Quoting technomage <technomage-hawke@cox.net>:

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> e2fsck -c /dev/device will do just this. you can even see its progress with a
> 
> - -v (verbose).
> 
> Mage
> 
> On Wednesday 14 May 2003 11:58 pm, AZ Pete wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Is there a util in Linux that will perform a surface scan of a hard disk
> to
> > locate bad sectors and mark them as unusable?
> > Something similar to Windows Scandisk util.
> > I recall during the Redhat installation routine there was a check box that
> > I could select to perform a surface scan.  What utility does this?
> > I have a hard drive I'm trying to get data from but there are a few bad
> > sectors and as a result I'm unable to pull an image of the drive.  I would
> > like to mark those sectors as bad, so I can then pull the image and get
> > most of the data off the drive.
> >
> > I tried using fsck, but it only seems to check if the filesystem is
> > contiguous.  It says that the filesystem is clean.
> >
> > Any help would be appreciated.
> > Peter
> >

I wonder how necessary (or accurate) scanning is since most drives today employ
 S.M.A.R.T. technology which monitors sector health and moves data to a new
sector when a problem is detected. 
http://www.anandtech.com/guides/viewfaq.html?i=120

Dennis Kibbe



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