So I have this external 2.5" drive salvaged from an old laptop of mine. I was trying to use it to backup/store data but the transfer to the drive fails repeatedly at the ~290GB mark leading me to believe that maybe there is a bad sector on the drive. I tried to inspect the drive using smartmontools and smartctl but since it is an external drive, i was not allowed to do so. Is there anyway for me to inspect and fix this drive? I am on fedora ublue-main. The HDD is a 1TB seagate drive.
Also interested ! But I read through my long search that bad sectors on a drive… Is a sign that your drive is failing and that there is nothing you can do about it.
Your drive will probably accumulate more and more bad sectors until it becomes unusable without data loss (there is some threshold).
There is however a way to “mark” them but that just a temporary solution. I wouldn’t put important/critical data on it (pictures, backups, OS…)