e2fsck advice needed

[Michael Wiktowy]

On 10/31/06, Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 31, 2006 at 12:13:19 -0500,
>   Michael Wiktowy <michael.wiktowy at gmail.com> wrote:
> > What could be causing this massive slowdown on the fsck? There didn't
>
> Bad sectors on the disk.

I finally made it through a pass using e2fsck -f -c -c -v -y /dev/hda2
and there was about a 1000 bad blocks. I am making another run to see
if that number is stable but I don't know if e2fsck reports the total
number of or the number of new bad blocks at the end of the run.

> You should also look at how many sectors have been remapped.
> If it is more than a handful that indicates serious problems.

Is there an easy and quick way to query this info from an installed
disk rather than running a badblock scan?

> If you have safely copied the data off, you can also run badblocks from
> a live cd and write test the whole drive. That may help get some bad sectors
> remapped.

Yes ... that was the first thing that I did and I was running from a
LiveCD of an unmentionable distro to do these checks. I was under the
impression that e2fsck called the badblocks program when you used the
-c flag. I'll look into that man page though.

Thanks for your help.

I still would like to know if reinstalling FC6 from scratch and
choosing to format the partition will undo all this work and clear
this badblocks table though. I suppose to get rid of the cruft I could
just do the dreaded rm -Rf / before installing and not modify or
format the existing partitions just to be sure. I recall there being a
"Check partition for bad blocks" flag available on installation (that
would make installations take *forever*) but I don't recall seeing it
recently.

/Mike