Gentlemen,
I need some fatherly advice about e2fsck: I have a disk that has been getting cranky, and "e2fsck -ccv" was indeed showing bad blocks. However, I repartitioned the disk, and now the same command reports that the disk is in perfect health! What happened to my bad blocks? Of course the partitions are now all empty, but surely a bad block is still a bad block? Has the disk's internal housekeeping somehow flagged those blocks off to the point that even e2fsck doesn't get a look at them? Or does e2fsck not work on empty partitions? Or has a repair somehow been made? How can I find out?
And: what are the practicalities of using '-c' vs. '-cc', that is, when and where do I want a read-write test vs. a read-only test?
And: after repartitioning, I tried this: "mkfs.ext4 -vcc ..." in the hopes of checking the disk at the same time as creating the FS, but it took hours and hours. In constrast: "e2fsck -ccvy ..." after the FS was created was much faster, less than an hour for a 500GB disk with 12 partitions. Why? One needs to know the facts of life before one starts fscking.