Checking for bad sectors - any utils?

[jaybee12]

I just bought a new USB external harddisk.

Just wanted to scan it for bad sectors... seems all the 'diagnostic' software is boot disk related and then doesn't seem to include USB disk.

thanks!!

[Las_Vegas]

TechTool will scan a disk sufficiently. Bad sectors are automatically flagged and replaced internally by modern ATA drives. If a drive is to the point where bad sectors aren't being repaired, the drive is ready for replacement.

[ElectricSheep]

As a poor man's solution, you can use the dd command line utility to scan the entire disk (and output it to /dev/null). If you get any I/O errors, you know the disk has bad sectors.

You can also use dd to correct bad sectors. Just have it force a write to the exact offset that an error occurred, and it will trip the hard drive's built in sector-reallocation routines.