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.
Edit : I am a linux noob so some hand holding will be appreciated. Also i am looking to use this drive only for low priority media files which i dont mind losing so please help even though it is not the greatest idea to use a failing drive
Edit 2 : It seems my post is not clear of what i am doing. I dont want to recover data from the drive. I want to try to use more of the drive for storing data
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 (there is some threshold).
There is however a way to “mark” them but thats just a temporary solution. I wouldn’t put important/critical data on it (pictures, backups, OS…)
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No, they’re not trying to recover data, they’re trying to copy data to the disk, to store backups, which they should absolutely not do, that disk is not fit as backup storage.
To be fair, i was trying to store some multimedia files on the drive. They are not essential(i have those essential files on another hdd). It will be good if i can use more of the potentially faulty hdd because then i can move more of these low priority media files to this drive and keep my main external drive free for important things.