However, you can still run these commands in your installed Linux distribution but you should not scan or mark the mounted “/” root filesystem. You can create a LIVE USB using this guide with any Linux operating system of your choice (recommended: Ubuntu). Hence I would suggest, you try this using LIVE operating system boot from a USB stick. It is better to run below commands when your disk is not mounted with the operating system.

In Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, and other distributions), you can easily do this via below terminal commands. Hence, you should periodically scan your hard drive (especially aging ones) for bad sectors if you feel your system is slowing down, or, disk IO is increasing. However, there is still a huge number of hard disk drives in use today which is aging and might slowly start having bad sectors. Also if you have data stored in those areas of the hard drive, it is very difficult to recover those as well.Īlthough, the latest computer storage technology such as SSD, etc almost eliminates this problem. However, the operating system still can write to those sectors unless you specifically mark them as ‘bad’ or unusable.

You can scan and mark them as unusable as well using these utilities.īad sectors or bad blocks are damaged portion of your mechanical hard disk drive which can not be used at all for data storing purposes. There are terminal utilities available in Linux which can help you to manage hard disk bad sectors.

Testdisk fedora