Linux

That's not looking good, usually on a bad sector the drive will write it to a spare sector transparently and mark it as bad internally. That means they've probably all already been used up.

smartctl should work just fine over USB, unless your USB adapter for the drive is really bad. Make sure you're using sudo as well. Worst comes to worst, try using it in a different computer.

Your next goal would be to get it to do a full self test with smartctl. A low level format might help clear some bad state and it might be okay afterwards with a fresh format accounting for whatever defect it built up over time.

I wouldn't recommend it. It might work for a bit and then just die completely.

I recommend to throw away this drive because blocks that are readable and writeable now, may fail soon. But if you want to use it anyway, it is possible to collect a list of unaccessible blocks usong badblocks and pass it to mkfs to create a filesystem that ignores that blocks. IIRC this is described in man badblocks.

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...)

Use ddrescue to copy to a working disk, if I remember it will try a number of times and eventually skip the broken sectors so that at least you have a working filesystem on the copy.

You should be able to use smartctl on a USB drive. I've never had an issue anyway. You may need to specify the transport type tho. I had a drive that it couldn't figure out on its own, but since it was an sata drive in an external enclosure, atapi is the transport protocol to use

sudo smartctl -a -d ata /dev/

Using the same switch you can run a long test. It's sort of a pain as it will kill the test on finding a bad sector. But you can take that sector number and plug it into hdparm to rewrite the sector hoping it will remap it. You won't be able to recover the data in a bad sector, But There are these extra sectors on the drive that firmware can replace the bad one with. It does this on a forced write command.Something along the lines of

hdparm --repair-sector --yes-i-know-what-i-am-doing </dev/

Again, you have data loss, you can't go back to no loss. All you can do is rescue anything important. You may (probably) need to run a long smartctl test again, and fix another sector. I have saved data off of drives with 100+ bad sectors this way... It's tedious and eventually I scripted it but it does work.

If you can’t check smart data over usb, plug it up to something internal.

Use the command badblocks -o sus_blocks.txt /dev/your_drive to make a file of your bad blocks. Be 100% sure you’re running bad blocks on the correct drive. Then partition with fdisk or whatever and use mkfs.ext4 -l sus_blocks.txt /dev/your_device to make a file system on there that knows about the bad blocks you found.

Make 100% sure you’re doing those operations on the target drive.

I checked that this still works using a drive with bad blocks last night. I did not check if mkfs.exfat supports that list though.

You can't fix a bad drive. Well you can, but it requires a few million dollars

I would get a new drive. I'm sorry but it is a lost cause. I would recommend taking it apart before you throw it away as it looks pretty cool inside.

You ought to be able to use those tools on an external drive.

You can’t “fix” bad sectors. A long time ago you could run badblocks on the drive, pipe the output to a file a d feed that file to your mkfs to map around those blocks. Idk if that still works. If you do it on a drive with data it’ll destroy the data I think.

You can look at your logs to see what’s failing at 290.

What error do you get in the system log when the transfer fails?

Hey did you find a solution? I maybe found something that could interest you !

Complementing @thebrain anwser, I totally wiped and fixed bad sectors on a old SSD drive I fought was borked because of alot of unallocated pending sectors. (In/out errors)

Keep in mind this is advanced stuff and could not work in your case and EVEN brick your hard drive. You will lost all your data and everything will be rewriten.

Manually rewrite sectors

https://leo.leung.xyz/wiki/Hdparm

Full wipe with "--security-erase-enhanced"

https://tinyapps.org/docs/wipe_drives_hdparm.html

This can take some time (3hours in my case) and it looks like your terminal is stuck, don't worry just wait until it finishes !

Again this can be DANGEROUS ! Only attempt such mesure if you don't care to lose your hard drive.

IF you needed the storage and badly, then I remember Hiren's BootCD used to come with a tool to scan for and quarantine bad sectors. However, this is just a bandaid on top of an infected wound.

The wound will keep spreading, eating up precious backup files. I've only ever used quarantining once on my mother in law's laptop because she had to wait weeks to get a new drive, due to the Philippines flooding back then.

Also, this was an old copy of BootCD that ran through terminal prompt, not a built in Windows PE, and I believe the tool I used has been removed. However, it seems to be replaced with a few alternatives.

Tell the drive to do a secure erase. If there are still bad blocks after that, it is absolutely garbage

Frankly you should never see bad blocks, but sometimes minor bad things happen and the drive has to tell you that this data is gone forever. If you write over those bad blocks at some point, the drive is supposed to remap them to spare blocks and carry on as if everything is okay. If it has run out of spare blocks, then the bad blocks stay forever. A secure erase might give the drive more wiggle room to re-allocate around a larger bad spot, IDK.

bad block are not fix able. however you can create a bacd block map to make your fs skip the bad block. if you have data on your disk currently, i would suggest to use ddrescue to dump a image of your disk, and recover file from it