On 19/04/2008, ropers  wrote:

quoted text
> On 18/04/2008, Calomel  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:
> AVAILABILITY

quoted text
> badblocks is part of the e2fsprogs package and is available from

> http://e2fsprogs.sourceforge.net.

Geez, I'm an eejit.
Travers Buda wrote:

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> 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  wrote:

quoted text
> On 2008-04-19, ropers  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%3Acont...

>

>

> Alternatively, you can use pkg_mklocatedb(1).

Ah! Thanks for that! :)
Thanks and regards,

--ropers