Bad Block Howto

Your hard disk fails on Linux - now what?

I happened to me a few times in the last few weeks. A filesystem check for a hard disk would take for ever - my system won't boot. One of the harddisk was reporting errors. At this time i have four different hard disks that are giving me trouble. All broken harddisks have been taken out of the system and I am analyzing the problem using a virtual machine and a USB-SATA bridge.

First step: remove harddisk from system

Hopefully your disk is not needed to boot or fully operate your system. In that case you might want to boot of a USB stick or other media. In any case my procedure is to remove the disk from the original system and use a different system for analysis. In my case i am using an Ubuntu based virtual machine and connect the drive via a USB-SATA bridge. With USB 2 devices the performance is poor. I am not using my old Logilink QP002 Sata Docking Station anymore for this reason.

The USB 3 device i bought in 2015: still serves me well.

Links

• https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/BadBlockHowto
• https://github.com/hradec/fix_smart_last_bad_sector
• http://dcere.com/hardware/2016/09/18/hard-disk.html
• https://serverfault.com/questions/461203/how-to-use-hdparm-to-fix-a-pending-sector
• https://serverfault.com/a/641135/162693
• https://linux.die.net/man/8/smartctl