What is the best way to check (and repair) hard drive for bad sectors?

Question

I used the following utilities to check my ext4 partitions:

Google and SO also suggest smartctl. I'm just wondering what are the differences between all those tools and which one is better.

htorque · Answer 1 · 2012-02-26 11:11:09Z

up vote 5 down vote

There is no way to repair bad sectors. They are automatically marked as unusable, without user intervention.

To find out what various programs do, see the man pages, for example:

You don't have to read everything, just the description.

edited Feb 26 '12 at 11:11

htorque
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answered Feb 14 '12 at 9:34

mikewhatever
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