Ubuntu – How to run a checkdisk

disk

I suspect there might be bad sector on a disk. I used ext3 filesystem.

What tool is the best equivalent of the error checking tool of Windows?

Best Answer

Disks

To check for bad sectors check the SMART data, probably the best accessible by launching the Disks utility (Palimpsest). Even if you don't see any bad blocks there, launch a self-test to be sure.

The program is bundled in the gnome-disk-utility package. Run gksudo gnome-disks

SMART from Palimpsest

Or in Ubuntu 16.04 version (3.18):

Badblocks

You can also use badblocks

sudo badblocks -sv /dev/sda

to just check, or to check and fix first write the result to a temporary file:

sudo badblocks -sv /dev/sda  > bad-blocks-result
sudo fsck -t ext4 -l bad-blocks-result /dev/sda1

will check the whole disk and print out all bad blocks encountered on /dev/sda.

From badblocks manual:

Important note: If the output of badblocks is going to be fed to the e2fsck or mke2fs programs, it is important that the block size is properly specified, since the block numbers which are generated are very dependent on the block size in use by the filesystem. For this reason, it is strongly recommended that users not run badblocks directly, but rather use the -c option of the e2fsck and mke2fs programs.

`fsck`

fsck itself will not help you find bad sectors, worse still, if there are a lot of bad sectors it can damage your data even more. Use it only when the disk is healthy.

Related Solutions

11.10 – Need to Try Several Times to Log into Ubuntu Normally

Make a backup of your disk if you suspect error and experience boot problems already, if you haven't already made one.

Try a scan for bad blocks. Start by checking what partitions you have:

mount | grep sda

Then for Linux partition found do:

fsck.ext4 -ck /dev/sda7

where you replace 7 with the actual partion number.

There is also a badblocks command, but I'm not familiar with it. It seems to scan the device filesystem agnostic. In other words, the filesystem used doesn't matter.

man badblocks

Leave checking NTFS to Windows.

Allow some time to get this answer reviewed by other visitors.

Ubuntu – How to use Ubuntu to rescue files from an NTFS drive

If it is a linux partition (ext4)

Go into a LiveCD or LiveUSB, then run sudo fsck -t ext4 /dev/sda# (where sda# is the device and partition number for your drive). If you're unsure which to run this on, please feel free to include in your question the output of sudo fdisk -l, and I can help narrow down which one to check.

If it is a Windows or NTFS partition

If the drive is "NTFS" and its returning unclean, you should boot into Windows and run a chkdisk on that partition. Within Linux, if you run an fsck on NTFS, its likely to break something (NTFS is a windows format, so you should use windows chkdisk). The NTFS fsck, while it may find the general errors, may cause problems if you need to run the NTFS drive within Windows.