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

  • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
    2·
    7 months ago

    If you can’t check smart data over usb, plug it up to something internal.

    Use the command badblocks -o sus_blocks.txt /dev/your_drive to make a file of your bad blocks. Be 100% sure you’re running bad blocks on the correct drive. Then partition with fdisk or whatever and use mkfs.ext4 -l sus_blocks.txt /dev/your_device to make a file system on there that knows about the bad blocks you found.

    Make 100% sure you’re doing those operations on the target drive.

    I checked that this still works using a drive with bad blocks last night. I did not check if mkfs.exfat supports that list though.