Time it takes to check for bad blocks on old HDD? (17.4)

[Member anti-ewaste]

I’m installing on a 80gb partition on an older 160gb drives, there has been some reallocated sectors so I checked the box in the installer to check for bad blocks. Conky shows there’s HDD activity but I’m wondering about how long it would take? The progress bar is still showing 2%.

BTW I’m trying this since I’m having GRUB issues where it seems to hang when rebuilding the config file. I was able to do boot repair but not rebuild config, it gets stuck at memtest found. BTW this machine still has Windows XP on it – and maybe I should just wipe it out..

Edit: The disk stats did go down from 60M to 40M, I guess it’s like when doing a benchmark depending on where it is at?

• This topic was modified 2 years, 4 months ago by anti-ewaste.

[Member seaken64]

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Usually when I do something like this I just let it run, overnight if needed. Scanning for errors on an old hard drive can take quite a bit of time.

Seaken64

[Member ModdIt]

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Should you have not done so already,
If the drive supports smart it might be wise to do an extended self diagnosis test.

[Member anti-ewaste]

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It turned out it was done in an hour or two – guess the progress bar just doesn’t track until it’s done. It already failed the SMART short test but is still usable – after reformatting the entire disk it installed. I guess since it failed with a partition on the second half of the drive I might re-partition in half again to avoid that area. Just squeezing as much use out of it as possible…

[Member ModdIt]

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HDD SMART fails can sometimes change after completely rewriting a drive then doing an extended test.
As the written state is magnetic it is not impossible to have unreadable areas due some states
not 0 or 1. Maybe the controller notes any bad areas in its internal table.
Just formatting does not fix the underlying issue. A disk with physical damage will fail with
increasing errors until it becomes unreadable.

Your drive might run a long time after doing this process of full write then check. Some disk
refurbishers go further sometimes doing up to 3 read write cycles before giving up.

I saw this being done in a tiny but very capable repair shop in asia.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 4 months ago by ModdIt.

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