On 19/04/2008, ropers <ropers@gmail.com> wrote:
quoted text
> On 18/04/2008, Calomel <avertege@calomel.org> wrote:
>  > Ropers,
>  >
>  >  You can find the badblocks utility prepackaged in "e2fsprogs".
>
>
> THANK YOU! :) I had wondered why I couldn't find badblocks among
>  OpenBSD's packages. This explains it. I will say in my defense ;-)
>  that badblocks is not ext2-specific, so while I have now seen that
>  it's part of these tools, possibly for historic reasons, that's not
>  necessarily a logical place for it to be.

Shame on me. I must be blind. Turns out it says right on the badblocks man page:

quoted text
> AVAILABILITY
> badblocks is part of the e2fsprogs package and is available from
> http://e2fsprogs.sourceforge.net.

Geez, I'm an eejit.

Travers Buda wrote:
quoted text
> I don't know if anyone brought this up, and I hate to state the
>  obvious, but if you're getting bad blocks then the hard drive has
>  exhausted its ability to deal with them on its own and should be
>  replaced.  Otherwise you'll see data loss/corruption and a higher
>  probability of a total drive failure.

Agreed. I see 3 usage areas for badblocks -svn:
- To intermittently proactively check whether my existing HDDs are dying.
- To intermittently check if my remaining floppies have still
survived. (I keep 2 copies of each floppy and chuck out the ones that
have gone bad, and make a new copy, so unless both copies go bad in
the same interval, I'm good.)
- To check whether any old HDDs that I'm given for free / that I pick
up off the kerb / that I pull out of a skip are still usable.
And yes, once badblocks complains, it's time to toss the disk.

On 19/04/2008, Stuart Henderson <stu@spacehopper.org> wrote:
quoted text
> On 2008-04-19, ropers <ropers@gmail.com> wrote:
>  > Looking at the package contents (
>  > http://www.openbsd.org/4.2_packages/i386/e2fsprogs-1.27p5.tgz-contents.html
>  > ), I've also figured out how to search for stuff like this in the
>  > future:
>  >
>  > http://www.google.ie/search?q=badblocks+inurl%3Aopenbsd.org+inurl%3Acontents.html&btnG...
>
>
> Alternatively, you can use pkg_mklocatedb(1).

Ah! Thanks for that! :)

Thanks and regards,
--ropers