Talk:Badblocks

used for data destruction
an organization i volunteer with[computer recycler] uses this program to erase donated hard disk drives and test the integrity at the same time. i believe they make four passes, and it works by writing to a sector, then reading back the sector and listening for change. any errors abouve a certain threshold are failed and torn apart for physical destruction...if any more expirenced editors care to add something about this procedure in 99bluefoxx (talk) 17:42, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

disambiguation?
shouldn't there be a disambiguation page mentiong that "badblocks" may also refer to the actual badblocks and not just some program used in a certain OS to deal with them? --TiagoTiago (talk) 12:31, 22 April 2009 (UTC)
 * No, because the bad blocks to which you are referring are actually bad sectors. You could, however, link to that article if it isn't linked in this article already.--86.8.252.7 (talk) 23:53, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

badblocks need to be updated
1. The number of blocks tested at one time is very small (only 64K) If you increase this to a MB at a time with -c 1024, you can almost double the speed of the badblocks utility.

2. badblocks can't handle disks over 2TB in size.

Wikipedia should mention that.--71.194.190.179 (talk) 18:51, 30 July 2011 (UTC)


 * The 2TB limit is simply the product of
 * 512-byte sectors
 * 32-bit block numbers
 * Both of these have been resolved in later versions of fsutils.
 * Martin Kealey (talk) 02:12, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

External links modified
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Isn't it a GNU utility?
The lead says that it's a Linux utility. Isn't it actually a GNU utility? 83.104.249.240 (talk) 01:08, 29 March 2018 (UTC)