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Hardware - Support => Hard Drives and SSDs => Topic started by: MS on October 08, 2018, 02:27:14 PM

Title: Bad sectors?
Post by: MS on October 08, 2018, 02:27:14 PM
The disks application tells me that a 250GB SSD drive that I have, has 100 bad sectors, apart from which being in an "OK" state. When I have particularly checked for bad sectors, attempted to check file system or repair file system - booting from a LiveUSB - it told me 100% is good. Quirk?
Title: Re: Bad sectors?
Post by: trinidad on October 08, 2018, 03:04:04 PM
The file system will usually still be good with a few bad sectors because they have already been reallocated on the disk. Modern Linux file systems do this automatically. So yes, it is quite likely that a media channel launched file system check program would declare that the file system is fine, and on the other hand, the OS internal disk check will report the bad sectors even though they have already been reallocated, but also report that they have been reallocated if you know where to look, and because fsck runs at boot up anyway the file system is likely fine. In all honesty, however, it actually is fairly common for low-end SSDs to ship with already reallocated sectors on OEM Windows machines as they all have extra memory cells and the new Windows user would never know the difference anyway without add/on disk analysis peripheral software. Your post is neither a security issue nor a bug. Please move to the hardware section of the forum.

TC   
Title: Re: Bad sectors?
Post by: MS on October 08, 2018, 03:21:13 PM
I have taken down the "bug" banner and I will remotely move the thread to another forum section if you tell me how-to, albeit when it comes to the system check, I was rather talking about the "badblocks" command running from LiveUSB. For the rest of your post, wut?

EDIT:

For the sake of precision, the disk is labeled as:

TOSHIBA THNSNK256GCS8 SATA 256GB (K8DC4101)
Title: Re: Bad sectors?
Post by: MS on October 11, 2018, 11:49:38 AM
I aim to run a destructive "badblocks" test from a LiveUSB, assumably via the commandline issue of:

Code: [Select]
badblocks -wsv
to try to see whether this would solve the deal mentioned in the starter post. I have actually also recently run Bleachbit in a root mode and it deleted one or two large files too much, so I rather reinstall the system than wait until something bugs out in a least expected moment.

The thing with Bleachbit jinxes, I have seen and experienced it already somewhere back in the 2013/2014, when I was checking out on the Bionic Beaver. Expecting a regular WindowsOS style brief cleanup, I was surprised how each time the program showed more contents to get rid of. Giving it a go several times in a row, I found that I effectively wiped out most of my drive.

I am uncertain whether it was Bleachbit though or something else.
Title: Re: Bad sectors?
Post by: MS on November 01, 2018, 08:05:48 AM
Having run the badblocks -wsv test, after reinstalling the system, the 100 bad sectors issue still occurs, but I guess this is a minor problem altogether.
Title: Re: Bad sectors?
Post by: Nyto on November 02, 2018, 04:18:32 PM
So this is a SSD. Did you try to see if those sectors marked as bad can be reclaimed?  sudo fstrim -a -v 

If you are still seeing the bad sectors message then you could always try and wipe the drive completely:  sudo hdparm -I /dev/sda


Of course, before every drive-wiping you may want to backup any important files.
Title: Re: Bad sectors?
Post by: MS on November 02, 2018, 07:08:03 PM
The point is, there are no bad sectors.