It has been 50h and it is only 0.04% of the way through... Which if my maths is correct means it will be finished after another 2,000,000h (not real maths)
hutber@hutber:~$ badblocks -svw -b 4096 -c 200000 /dev/sda -o bb_sdc.txt
Checking for bad blocks in read-write mode
From block 0 to 1953506645
Testing with pattern 0xaa: 0.04% done, 50:47:27 elapsed. (0/783975/0 errors)
Is there a way I can run this without it taking so long?
Apparently my hard disk has decided to get damaged and my Windows NTFS partition is not accessible. I have a dual boot, but the Windows one would not initialise (maybe not solvable).
I will more likely have to format that partition, but I was wondering if there is any chance to recover the data (mounting under Ubuntu).
The usual mounting commands are throwing errors at me, probably due to the damaged blocks. I know I can use badblocks in order to try to recover the partition, but I'm not sure if after using it I will be able to mount it under Ubuntu without losing the data.
So... is it safe? Or, is there any other way to solve that problem? Or... have I lost the data completely? :(
EDIT:
I have run sudo ntfsfix -b -d /dev/sda2 and the output is the following:
Mounting volume... OK
Processing of $MFT and $MFTMirr completed successfully.
Checking the alternate boot sector... OK
NTFS volume version is 3.1.
Going to un-mark the bad clusters ($BadClus)... No bad clusters...OK
NTFS partition /dev/sda2 was processed successfully.
So... apparently no bad blocks... Very strange, since I still can't mount that partition, even if I try to force the mount:
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda2 /media/flash/wind -o force
ntfs_attr_pread_i: ntfs_pread failed: Error de entrada/salida
Failed to read NTFS $Bitmap: Error de entrada/salida
NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or it's a
SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows
then reboot into Windows twice. The usage of the /f parameter is very
important! If the device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate
it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g.
/dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the 'dmraid' documentation
for more details.
I have a 10-years old 320 Gb HDD which I've used as an external drive, and it traveled with me for much of those 10 years. Needless to say, it survived more than a few falls (including those while in operation), and got some bad sectors. When I actually started to get read errors, not just SMART sector relocation warnings, I moved away everything important from it (using ddrescue for some files). Sure I can't trust this drive anymore, but I still want to use it to copy once and keep some movies/FLACs, to free some space on laptop's SSD+HDD, as long as the external drive still works. I don't care losing some or all of these files, as I either have backups at home and/or can re-download easily.
The problem is, if I format this drive and start copying the files there, somewhere around 25% I get a write failure, necessitating USB cable unplug (^C is not enough!), same happens with badblocks both in read and write mode. After playing a bit with badblocks' "from" and "to" parameters, I've found that 90%+ of the drive is OK, and there are basically 3 bad block areas. A short script and I got a text file with block numbers (yes I didn't forget -b 4096 for badblocks) covering these areas and lots of extra space around to be safe. But when I did e2fsck -l badblocks.txt, it still hangs! seems like it's trying to read those bad blocks anyway, not just to mark as bad and forget. Is there any other way to get around this? Or maybe other filesystem (thought about FAT, but I don't see any way to feed badblocks.txt to fsck.vfat)? Or 4 separate partitions covering the "good" areas is the best solution for this case?
Update: some quotes from man to make the case more clear
man e2fsck:
-i input_file
Read a list of already existing known bad blocks. Badblocks
will skip testing these blocks since they are known to be bad.
thus, badblocks promises to skip the blocks listed (and it does, as it doesn't hang with all the suspicious ranges in badblocks.txt!)
man badblocks:
-l filename
Add the block numbers listed in the file specified by filename
to the list of bad blocks. The format of this file is the same
as the one generated by the badblocks(8) program.
there's no promise it will not try to access these blocks, though. But why the hell it may want to access them?
Note that the
block numbers are based on the blocksize of the filesystem.
Hence, badblocks(8) must be given the blocksize of the filesys‐
tem in order to obtain correct results. As a result, it is much
simpler and safer to use the -c option to e2fsck, since it will
assure that the correct parameters are passed to the badblocks
program.
I'd be happy but it hangs on a first bad block. Plus, -c is incompatible with -l - thus, I either scan the disk or manually mark the bad sectors. But why, if I choose the latter option, it still wants to access these supposedly "bad" sectors is beyond my understanding...
Is it possible to prevent an external hard drive from powering down? I left the drive on over the night for a large download, but when I checked it in the morning, the download failed with the message unable to access the drive.
I am able to read/write to the drive perfectly well, small downloads are fine, but downloads which take more time, seem to fail because of some i/o error.
I have performed a badblocks scan on the drive and no errors were found.
Unable to start a SMART self-test:
Disconnected and then reconnected external USB drive. dmesg results follow:
[ 289.881673] usb 1-1.1: USB disconnect, device number 5
[ 305.182474] usb 1-1.1: new high-speed USB device number 6 using ehci-pci
[ 305.275807] usb 1-1.1: New USB device found, idVendor=152d, idProduct=2338
[ 305.275812] usb 1-1.1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=5
[ 305.275825] usb 1-1.1: Product: USB to ATA/ATAPI bridge
[ 305.275828] usb 1-1.1: Manufacturer: JMicron
[ 305.275830] usb 1-1.1: SerialNumber: 000001D91CA8
[ 305.276594] usb-storage 1-1.1:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[ 305.276914] scsi host5: usb-storage 1-1.1:1.0
[ 306.275373] scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access WDC WD25 00KS-00MJB0 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
[ 306.275787] sd 5:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0
[ 306.276317] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] 488397168 512-byte logical blocks: (250 GB/233 GiB)
[ 306.277429] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off
[ 306.277435] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 28 00 00 00
[ 306.278429] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] No Caching mode page found
[ 306.278433] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 306.288959] sdc: sdc1 sdc2
[ 306.292063] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI disk
Output of 'blkid' while the drive is in use. I took that screenshot while copying 500MB worth of files to the drive.
Output of lsblk below:
userone@userone:~$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 232.9G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 487M 0 part /boot
├─sda2 8:2 0 1K 0 part
└─sda5 8:5 0 59.2G 0 part
└─sda5_crypt 252:0 0 59.2G 0 crypt
├─ubuntu--vg-root 252:1 0 43.2G 0 lvm /
└─ubuntu--vg-swap_1 252:2 0 15.9G 0 lvm [SWAP]
sdb 8:16 0 232.9G 0 disk
├─sdb1 8:17 0 500M 0 part
├─sdb2 8:18 0 232G 0 part
└─sdb3 8:19 0 470M 0 part
sdc 8:32 0 232.9G 0 disk
├─sdc1 8:33 0 232.4G 0 part /media/userone/New Volume
└─sdc2 8:34 0 470M 0 part
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom
loop0 7:0 0 86.6M 1 loop /snap/core/4571
loop1 7:1 0 90.3M 1 loop /snap/coolreader3/1
loop2 7:2 0 86.7M 1 loop /snap/simplescreenrecorder/1
loop3 7:3 0 236.5M 1 loop /snap/pycharm-community/64
loop4 7:4 0 86.9M 1 loop /snap/core/4830
loop5 7:5 0 85M 1 loop /snap/simplescreenrecorder-mardy/4
loop6 7:6 0 86.6M 1 loop /snap/core/4650
userone@userone:~$
SMART Data & Self-Tests Overall Assessment reports for both disks Disk is OK. What does this mean? According to the following two screenshots is my hard disk doomed?
