Isolate bad sectors on an ext3 partition?
 

I think I may have a couple of bad sectors on my hard drive. Sometimes I run into read errors when I burn a DVD or try to copy even though all the permissions are set correctly. And after formatting the partition I still sometimes get the same errors.

Is there a way to find and isolate bad blocks or sectors on an ext3 partition?

Your help would be greatly appreciated.

man 8 badblocks

You could reformat using this command:

mke2fs -j -c /dev/hd?

the -c option stands for "check"; it will look for bad spots and make them inaccessible.

There exists also a command which does not reformat but simply checks for bad blocks:

badblocks /dev/hd? number-of-blocks-on-the-device

If it's not the disk, you may have to take a closer look at your RAM. A faulty stick of those is a notorious source of read/write errors.

The drive might be failing. Check the drive out using smartctl;

[root@localhost ~]#smartctl --all /dev/hda

Thank you very much for your help, folks!