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Back to Cheatsheets Index

badblocks

Further in depth documentation on ArchWiki and man.archlinux.org.

Flags

  • -b block size, 512 or 4096 unless you have a highly specialised enterprise drive (influences speed)
  • -c cache size (influences speed)

Scan drive in read only mode

Safest test, no data will be written however physically damaged disks may be further damaged by continuous reads.

badblocks -vs -b 4096 -c 65536 /dev/sda

Scan drive in non-destructive read-write mode

Interrupting this with a single CTRL+C will be handled gracefully without data loss, however an ungraceful error can occur in the drive itself, IO or in OS resulting in data loss.

badblocks -nvs -b 4096 -c 65536 /dev/sda

Scan drive in DESTRUCTIVE multi-pass write mode (4-passes [0xAA, 0x55, 0xFF, 0x00])

This will overwrite all data. badblocks -wvs -b 4096 -c 65536 /dev/sda

Note: after the drive is overwritten Windows may think drive is damaged and may prevent you from formatting it in the Disk Management GUI, ensure to format the drive with a new partition table (GPT or MBR) in Linux before use on Windows.

Note: this should not be used as a replacement for a secure erase.