Ubuntu
gparted package

badblocks won't run in live session

Asked by Michael Graaf

I am trying, within a Hardy live CD session, to wipe clean a hard drive to enable reinstallation (don't ask...). Wipe utility dban aborted suspecting bad sectors. I turned to badblocks for diagnosis. My first attempt to launch it (sudo badblocks /dev/sda) led to a line about the device seeming to be in use; I went to the filesystem to see about unmounting but nothing showed as mounted. But on second attempt, badblocks started scanning.

It was going fine, though using a lot of CPU, until I tried simultaneously to launch a Google search. This overloaded the machine and screen greyed. I left it for ages to work through its backlog but after more than an hour, still unable to get any response, powered off. Now in a new session, my first launch yielded "command not found" and after I did "sudo fdisk -l" successfully and retried "sudo badblocks /dev/sda" it simply moves the cursor to the next line without any output.

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Vihar (vmankov) said : 		#1

Well I just ran it now and the output is the same. Note it could mean the program is running and nothing till now is to be reported.

To check this I ran a second terminal and ran there the command "top". It showed me the program badblocks is running. May be it needs a time to accomplish. So I leave it for now and wait to see if it will end with any output.

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Vihar (vmankov) said : 		#2

I'm not running from LiveCD though

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Jeruvy (jeruvy) said : 		#3

Technically you cannot scan an ACTIVE disk, try doing this from a LIVECD, or SUPERGRUBDISK, rather than a running session.

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Vihar (vmankov) said : 		#4

Well, under Windows I scanned many times for bad blocks and the scanning program had to be the only running program. I had to deactivate even the screensaver otherwise the scanning returns to the beginning if the screensaver activates. I scanned for bad blocs under DOS too.

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Vihar (vmankov) said : 		#5

In this case here I ran, as described, the badblocks program in terminal and it closed after a long time without any output. I haven't any idea if it did something.
In the previous answer I meant "the only running program that accesses the hard drive".

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