On Sat, 2019-10-19 at 10:29 +0000, George R Goffe via users wrote:
Hi,
I have a 2TB HDD with a possibly major problem. I have cleared the
data from it and have tried to run "mke2fs -t ext4 -j /dev/sdc1" but
after 24 hours it had just finished the 0xaa phase and started
reading when the drive seemingly dropped ready and was re-assigned as
a new device to /dev/sdf. Argh. I did get an ended message with an
ending block number. I'd like to restart at that point in time and
continue the media check. I don't see anything in the mke2fs man page
though.
Has anyone seen or heard of a way to do this?
mkfs -c just runs badblocks with the appropriate parameters. You can
specify how many blocks to skip, for example badblocks /dev/sdc1 1234.
You'll need to specify the block size correctly to badblocks, and
you'll want badblocks -o /tmp/blocklist to save the bad blocks so mkfs
-l /tmp/blocklist reads it back. To get the block size, format it
without -c and look at the output or use dumpe2fs.
Doing this over a USB2 cable took me two weeks last time I tried, for a
4TB drive. I hope it's faster for you.
(related note: I find normal 2 and 4TB USB drives highly unreliable.)