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

  • bizdelnick@lemmy.ml
    1·
    1 year ago

    I recommend to throw away this drive because blocks that are readable and writeable now, may fail soon. But if you want to use it anyway, it is possible to collect a list of unaccessible blocks usong badblocks and pass it to mkfs to create a filesystem that ignores that blocks. IIRC this is described in man badblocks.

  • N0x0n@lemmy.ml
    1·
    1 year ago

    Hey did you find a solution? I maybe found something that could interest you !

    Complementing @thebrain anwser, I totally wiped and fixed bad sectors on a old SSD drive I fought was borked because of alot of unallocated pending sectors. (In/out errors)

    Keep in mind this is advanced stuff and could not work in your case and EVEN brick your hard drive. You will lost all your data and everything will be rewriten.

    Manually rewrite sectors

    https://leo.leung.xyz/wiki/Hdparm

    Full wipe with “–security-erase-enhanced”

    https://tinyapps.org/docs/wipe_drives_hdparm.html

    This can take some time (3hours in my case) and it looks like your terminal is stuck, don’t worry just wait until it finishes !

    Again this can be DANGEROUS ! Only attempt such mesure if you don’t care to lose your hard drive.

    • Sentau@discuss.tchncs.deOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      No I am still working on this. Thanks for the advice. I was having trouble with hdparm because I didn’t have enough information about with sectors are bad. Was trying to use ddrescue to make a map. Thanks for the resources

  • leds@feddit.dk
    0·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Sentau@discuss.tchncs.deOP
      0·
      1 year ago

      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.