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I suspect there might be bad sector on a disk. What tool is the best equivalent of the error checking tool of windows?

(I used ext3)

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up vote 76 down vote accepted

Disks

To check for bad sectors check the SMART data, probably the best accessible by launching the Disks utility (Palimpsest). Even if you don't see any bad blocks there, launch a self-test to be sure.

The program is bundled in the gnome-disk-utility package. Run gksudo gnome-disks

SMART from Palimpsest

Or in Ubuntu 16.04 version (3.18):

SMART from Disks

Badblocks

You can also use badblocks

sudo badblocks -sv /dev/sda

to just check, or to check and fix first write the result to a temporary file:

sudo badblocks -sv /dev/sda  > bad-blocks-result
sudo fsck -t ext4 -l bad-blocks-result /dev/sda1

will check the whole disk and print out all bad blocks encountered on /dev/sda.

From badblocks manual:

Important note: If the output of badblocks is going to be fed to the e2fsck or mke2fs programs, it is important that the block size is properly specified, since the block numbers which are generated are very dependent on the block size in use by the filesystem. For this reason, it is strongly recommended that users not run badblocks directly, but rather use the -c option of the e2fsck and mke2fs programs.

fsck

fsck itself will not help you find bad sectors, worse still, if there are a lot of bad sectors it can damage your data even more. Use it only when the disk is healthy.

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Thanks a lot, that gave me the bad sector info I was looking for. – Guillaume Coté Aug 30 '11 at 1:04
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Actually badblocks's manual discourages from using it directly and directs users to e2fsck with "-c" (for read only check) or "-cc" (for read write check) option. – mrówa Apr 29 '13 at 21:01
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as a note, on 13.04 you run palimpsest by just running "disks" from the ubuntu menu, however...I dont' see an option to launch a self-test (possibly because I have only one drive, and it's the one running Ubuntu...) – rogerdpack Oct 11 '13 at 14:04
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@mrówa the manual only says to do that if "the output of badblocks is going to be fed to the e2fsck or mke2fs programs" – Jon Dec 23 '13 at 14:31
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this is now called gnome-disks – endolith Mar 2 '14 at 0:47
up vote 16 down vote

badblocks

You can check for badblocks running the command

  1. sudo badblocks -nsv /dev/[device-partition] > bad-blocks-result for a non-destructive read-write test. That will generate a file called bad-blocks-result with the sectors damaged.

    • -n Use non-destructive read-write mode. By default only a non-destructive read-only test is done.

    • -s Show the progress of the scan by writing out rough percentage completion of the current badblocks pass over the disk.

    • -v Verbose mode.

  2. Then, you can run sudo fsck -t ext3 -l bad-blocks-result /dev/[device-partition] to tell the file system where the bad sectors are and move data away from them, if possible.

You can find more reading about it here.

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To continue with badblocks later or if you forgot to export the bad sector to a text file (like me) this answer will help you: superuser.com/a/693000/218025 – chelder Jan 21 '15 at 18:22
    
can I use badblocks to check my windows partition? Or will it somehow may damage it ? – Private Jul 29 '16 at 20:14
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@Private If you have a new question, please use the "Ask a question" link at the top. – John May 28 '17 at 3:45
up vote 34 down vote

fsck - check and repair a Linux file system. Invoke it using

fsck /dev/sda1

where /dev/sda1 is the drive you want to check. See 'man fsck' for more details.

There's also 'badblocks' command which checks a device for, you guessed it, bad blocks.

The drive need to be unmounted when checked, so to check the root partition you need to create a file 'forcefsck' in the root of the partition and reboot. The device will be checked upon the next boot:

sudo touch /forcefsck
sudo reboot

Alternatively, you can boot from a Live CD and run the check from there.

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Thanks, the machine is running without a monitor, is there a way to access the output of the check after the reboot? – Guillaume Coté Aug 29 '11 at 3:58
    
I created the file and rebooted, but it was really quick and there is nothing new in the boot.log. – Guillaume Coté Aug 29 '11 at 4:14
    
fsck just do a very quick check, I tried option -c to check for the bad block. – Guillaume Coté Aug 29 '11 at 7:00
    
fsck -c just said : /dev/sda9: Updating bad block inode. I have no info on how many bad node and which proportion of the file system they represent. – Guillaume Coté Aug 29 '11 at 14:09
    
sudo dumpe2fs -b /dev/sda9. But I think it is better if the disk takes care of faulty sectors, not the filesystem (SMART, badblocks etc, see my post). – arrange Aug 29 '11 at 16:29

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