Hi Peter, > I was then able to format the whole disk as NTFS.
Given formatting and partitioning are, these days, just writing bytes that's the same as any other data as far as the disk is concerned, there is no difference between filesystems that means you can format it as one type and not another. It suggests there are sporadic intermittent disk errors, either in the media or the controller, and it's just pot luck what operation you're attempting when there's a failure. You could use badblocks(8) with either -n or -w to actively write then read to every disk block to try and show the extent of the problem. It would also allow the drive's controller to remap bad blocks onto, hopefully good, ones from its reserve store. The man page needs a careful read. > Conclusion: Success, and the disk will be OK for play, but don't be > surprised if it continues to degrade. Right. `smartctl -x /dev/sda' will show what the drive's controller thinks of the state of play. Cheers, Ralph. -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday, 2018-05-01 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ New thread: mailto:[email protected] / CHECK IF YOU'RE REPLYING Reporting bugs well: http://goo.gl/4Xue / TO THE LIST OR THE AUTHOR
