jamespheely

hey there guys,

im having some strange problem i have just installed ubuntu 9.10 and it is saying my hard disk is failing and there are bad sectors.

is there a program i can use to fix these bad sectors or is there another way around this?

would really appreciate your help

thanks

T D

You can use something like windows' chkdsk to close off those bad sectors but I don't think you can repair them.

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thiussat

You don't need Windows to check a disk for badblocks. Linux comes with a utility called "badblocks" as well as various filesystem tools like fsck.

First thing I would do, if you have a lot of time, is run fsck on the disk (warning this will take a whole day on a modern disk). In order to do this, the disk must be unmounted. So, the best way to do it is boot from the Ubuntu LiveCD and then open a terminal and type:
Where "sda" = the disk in question.

This command will force automatic bad block checking and it will automatically mark all known bad sectors as bad so that they wont "interfere" in the future. After you boot back into the OS, I would make sure that smartmontools is installed:

You will need to make sure that "SMART' capability is enabled in your BIOS. After you get it installed, then you can run an extended offline test (this will run in the background while the computer is on and you wont even know it is running). To do that:

And then to see the overall health of the system, you can type:

Also, please read the manpages for these programs if you want a more detailed explanation:

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legoman786

I trust this man for all my Linux problems.

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