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How to check for bad sectors on a drive and repair them

A bad sector is a sector on a disk drive or in memory that cannot be used due to permanent damage or an OS inability to access it.

Badblocks is a Linux utility that one can use to find out the bad sectors on a disk drive.

For ex-

badblocks -v /dev/vda2

We will thus see the badblocks on the disk drive. Also we can redirect the output to the file as well:-

badblocks -v /dev/vda2 > bad-sectors


Once we'll know about the bad sectors in the drive, we can try to fix/repair the errors using the file system check utilities of Linux like the e2fsck command below :-

e2fsck -y /dev/vda2

Note: However, it is always recommended to use e2fsck only when you have unmounted the disk drive in the single-user mode, otherwise there will be possibilities of data loss at that time.