It appears that when the badblocks (or e2fsck) program is run, a list of the bad blocks on the drive is written to the "bad blocks list". I have also heard that once there are a few (non-contigious) blocks in the list, it's time to replace the hard drive, as there are surely more to come.

So my question is: how do I just display the bad blocks list, without actually running badblocks or e2fsck, (which appear to only display newly found bad blocks)?

Thanks, Mike

According to the badblocks man pages, there is nothing that states only new-found bad blocks are written to standard output. I get the impression that all found bad blocks are written to standard output unless an output file is specified. The -o <output file> option will cause badblocks to write output to the named file. So, I'd assume that 'badblocks -o badblocks.txt' would write the found badblocks to the file badblocks.txt.

The only thing to be wary of, per the man pages, is don't run badblocks on a mounted partition. The default is non-destructive reads. Non-destructive read-write can be specified with the -n option.