Comment 35 for bug 430333

My comment to shadowblast101 was so he might "rescue" his drive by writing zeroes to it (so the regular utilities won't barf when they look at it)...

I looked into how to use dd to write different patterns -- the trick is to pipe the output of /dev/zero through /usr/bin/tr to convert to whatever pattern you want. But surely you then have to go back and read what was written and compare and I haven't learned how to do that.

For those of us who aren't coders, maybe we should use the badblocks utility?

I will see if I can try some different kernels when booting from a USB stick or SD card -- it seems like that might be the easiest strategy to narrow down which kernel introduces the troublesome code. For that purpose I think I might start with Debian...