2

I'm running badblocks on a 2TB external USB drive (WD Elements) for about 4 days now and it is still running. I initiated the command as follows:

/sbin/badblocks -wsv -o badblocks-ext-disk.txt /dev/sdc

It's output untill now has been:

Checking for bad blocks in read-write mode
From block 0 to 1953481728
Testing with pattern 0xaa: done
Reading and comparing: done
Testing with pattern 0x55: done
Reading and comparing: 857148544 / 1953481728

I'm not really familiar with badblocks and can't imagine that it should take this long. I would imagine badblocks should already have put some contents in badblocks-ext-disk.txt but it's still 0 bytes. So now I guess that it will write it's output when it finishes the scan.

Can I cancel badblocks and still get some useful results? Are there any other tips you can give me on analysing this disk on defects? And what is causing the long scan?

Ambidex
  • 121

2 Answers2

2

Yet it seems noteworthy that badblocks writes the addresses of bad blocks to -o outputfile during the process, not at the end.

So if you had an empty output file this means that so far no bad blocks were found. Additionally, at least in the current version of badblocks (as comes shipped with e2fsprogs 1.42.12 from August 2014) the -s parameter shows output ala: 

Testing with pattern Ox55: 4.3% done, 7:03 elapsed. (0/0/1 errors)

where the numbers refer to number of (read/write/corruption) errors So you would know during the process whether there were any errors found already or not.

Jakob
  • 121
  • 3
1

Over on SuperUser they said that if used with -w:

Badblocks makes 4 runs. On a 1 TB external HD it usually takes around 70 hours.

But it also depends on other switches and the interface, read more here.

Community
  • 1
Jan
  • 7,772
  • 2
  • 35
  • 41
  • Hi Jan, thanks for the reply. Do you have any idea how to still get some useful results while cancelling the scan? – Ambidex Sep 02 '14 at 06:50
  • No idea, sorry. You have gotten so far, perhaps you just wait a day or two longer and "earn" the results. – Jan Sep 02 '14 at 10:11