How do you use badblocks?

Question

I can never remember the specific incantations for using badblocks, and apparently google isn't much help either. Yes I could read the man page but I remember it's like 4 options I have to use to get it to work the way I want. I need to do a destructive (rw) test on a new drive, and a read only on a drive that fell out of my raid array. I want to see the output if it finds problems and how far along it is.

Answer 1

Let /dev/sda be the new drive on which to test destructive-rw and /dev/sdb the old drive where you want non-destructive-r

# badblocks -wsv /dev/sda
# badblocks -sv /dev/sdb

-s gives the process indicator

-v gives verbose output

-w enables destructive read-write

-n would be non-destructive read-write

Read-only testing is the default and doesn't need special parameters.