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.
You ought to be able to use those tools on an external drive.
You can’t “fix” bad sectors. A long time ago you could run badblocks on the drive, pipe the output to a file a d feed that file to your mkfs to map around those blocks. Idk if that still works. If you do it on a drive with data it’ll destroy the data I think.
You can look at your logs to see what’s failing at 290.