6

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I issued the sudo badblocks -nv /dev/sda6 yesterday. I just woke up and it's still like that.

The documentation says that the -n parameter specifies that the test should be non-destructive but takes a little longer time.

Is it working or is it frozen or what? Does anyone know?

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3
  • 1
    Next time, use the -s switch to show progress.
    – psusi
    Jan 9, 2014 at 16:12
  • yes yes I thought the "v" would show the progress but it doesn't and now I'm stuck ... it's still working till the moment :s :s toooo much time
    – Mina Michael
    Jan 9, 2014 at 21:37
  • 1
    My 160 GB m1.small instance took about 1.5 hours to complete with no options specified.
    – pmagunia
    May 31, 2014 at 3:34

3 Answers 3

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15

You can watch per-process I/O activity with iotop. Install:

sudo apt-get install iotop

Then launch:

sudo iotop

Watch it for 30 sec. Does it show badblocks doing any I/O? If yes, then it is working, if not, it is likely frozen.

Next time you may launch badblocks with the -s parameter:

sudo badblocks -nsv /dev/sda6

this will show progress.

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6
  • so I just open a new terminal and type sudo iotop?
    – Mina Michael
    Jan 9, 2014 at 12:27
  • ...just tried doing that now and I got command not found. is it a program that I have to install?
    – Mina Michael
    Jan 9, 2014 at 12:30
  • 1
    @MinaMichael Yep, just install it if you don't have. sudo apt-get install iotop It is an I/O monitoring app.
    – falconer
    Jan 9, 2014 at 12:31
  • 1
    ...2 badblocks operations, 99.99% IO and my computer's running slow. Definitely running!! thank you soo soo much! your answer hits the spot! :D
    – Mina Michael
    Jan 9, 2014 at 12:36
  • p.s: I thought the -v would show the progress. oh well. next time :)
    – Mina Michael
    Jan 9, 2014 at 12:37
6

You can see where badblocks is currently positioned in the drive by looking at its fdinfo in proc, i.e:

root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# ps ax | grep badblock
 3772 tty1     D+    12:11 badblocks -v /dev/sdb
 5478 tty2     S+     0:00 grep --color=auto badblock

root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# ls -l /proc/3772/fd
total 0
lrwx------ 1 root root 64 Mar  3 00:41 0 -> /dev/tty1
lrwx------ 1 root root 64 Mar  3 00:41 1 -> /dev/tty1
lrwx------ 1 root root 64 Mar  3 00:41 2 -> /dev/tty1
lr-x------ 1 root root 64 Mar  3 00:41 3 -> /dev/sdb

root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# cat /proc/3772/fdinfo/3
pos:    1707980816384
flags:  0140000
mnt_id: 24

root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# lsblk -bd /dev/sdb
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM          SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sdb      8:16   0 2000398934016  0 disk

So, this badblocks run is about 85% done.

@falconer's answer (use iotop) is a nice way to watch its current rate, but fdinfo shows you how much progress the program has made.

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0

Besides iotop, you may also want to look at dmesg:

dmesg -w

In my case, badblocks was stuck at 2.81%, there was no iotop activity and dsmesg showed the followng message on regular intervals:

[ 7371.945131] INFO: task badblocks:19760 blocked for more than 120 seconds.
[ 7371.945134]       Tainted: G           OE     5.0.0-29-generic #31~18.04.1-Ubuntu
[ 7371.945135] "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message.
[ 7371.945136] badblocks       D    0 19760  19759 0x00000004
[ 7371.945137] Call Trace:
[ 7371.945140]  __schedule+0x2bd/0x850
[ 7371.945141]  schedule+0x2c/0x70
[ 7371.945145]  io_schedule+0x16/0x40
...

Not sure what the issue is in my case but it may be a bug?

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