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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Repairing bad sectors in an external drive (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

26 comments fedilink hide all child comments

So I have this external 2.5" drive salvaged from an old laptop of mine. I was trying to use it to backup/store data but the transfer to the drive fails repeatedly at the ~290GB mark leading me to believe that maybe there is a bad sector on the drive. I tried to inspect the drive using smartmontools and smartctl but since it is an external drive, i was not allowed to do so. Is there anyway for me to inspect and fix this drive? I am on fedora ublue-main. The HDD is a 1TB seagate drive.

Edit : I am a linux noob so some hand holding will be appreciated. Also i am looking to use this drive only for low priority media files which i dont mind losing so please help even though it is not the greatest idea to use a failing drive

Edit 2 : It seems my post is not clear of what i am doing. I dont want to recover data from the drive. I want to try to use more of the drive for storing data

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Use ddrescue to copy to a working disk, if I remember it will try a number of times and eventually skip the broken sectors so that at least you have a working filesystem on the copy.

[–] kerthale 6 points 6 months ago

ddrescue to the rescue! This is the best advice to get the data out. Don’t muck about too much because more things can fail. Use ddrescue to rescue the data and write a disk image somewhere else. Then make another copy of this one and try to do the filesystem rescue magic on that copy. Really make sure the bad disk marked as unusable.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I think there is misunderstanding because of my phrasing. i dont want to recover data from the drive. Instead i want to repair the drive to use for low priority external storage.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

Too far gone at this point. It sucks, but every drive has an end of life. After that point, no matter how many hoops you jump through, they're read only until they quit entirely. I think that's where you are now, so even if there's something in the thread that works to get it back to being able to write to it, you should consider what you get on there as read only, and maybe that only is "only once".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

You can't my dude