Rewriting bad sectors

[jbs30000]

I posted a thread, but have yet to see it. I am typing this to see if this will get posted or disappear too.

[zerozero]

OK, this got posted, so I [don't know what happened] with my first post. Guess I'll have to repost.

[jbs30000]

I tried posted this earlier, but though some mistake it never happened. So here's my second attempt.

I am new to Linux Mint and have limited Linux experience overall. I have some bad sectors so I wanted to have them written as unusable but I'm not sure if I can do so on the Disk Utility, so through some Googling I found a way to do it command line for Ubuntu. Since Mint is based on Ubuntu and Debian I thought I'd give it a try but I guess it isn't exactly the same.

First I wrote the bad sectors to a bad-blocks file sucessfully.

Code: Select all

sudo badblocks /dev/sdb > /home/joel/bad-blocks


But I'm having problems marking the sectors as bad.

Code: Select all

sudo mkfs -c bad-blocks /dev/sdb
[sudo] password for joel:
mke2fs 1.41.14 (22-Dec-2010)
mkfs.ext2: invalid blocks count '/dev/sdb' on device 'bad-blocks'


And

Code: Select all

sudo fsck -l bad-blocks /dev/sdb


Just brings up the help file on how to use fsck.

So, what am I doing wrong and how can I mark the bad sectors? Thank you.

[jbs30000]

I guess after reading up on mkfs that would be a huge mistake.

[zerozero]

[topics merged, subject correct for clarification on the merged topic, language edited in one of the posts]

[jbs30000]

Thanks zerozero.

Googling for help and not specifying Linux Mint lead me to try this, sudo e2fsck -c -c -k -C 0 /dev/sdb1

Fingers crossed this will do the trick.

[jbs30000]

That seemed to have worked, so I guess I learned that if I don't necessarily need to search for solutions specific to the Mint distro.

I'm still learning Linux, and I know that some ways of doing things are specific to a distribution and others universal. I'm just trying to work out which is which.