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.
Too far gone at this point. It sucks, but every drive has an end of life. After that point, no matter how many hoops you jump through, they’re read only until they quit entirely. I think that’s where you are now, so even if there’s something in the thread that works to get it back to being able to write to it, you should consider what you get on there as read only, and maybe that only is “only once”.