I have a generic hardware problem not specific to NRR. Kindly redirect me elsewhere if this forum is not appropriate.
After a re-installation, I re-partitioned the remainder of my system disk into a single large ext4 partition: let us call it /dev/sda3 (/home is on another drive).
Every few boots, I encountered an error mounting /dev/sda3, and boot would drop into a root shell. I tried fsck repairs twice but on the third occurrence, I decided to bite the bullet and format afresh the filesystem on that partition, more carefully and slowly.
I tried
sudo mkfs.etx4 -ccFv -L Data1 /dev/sda3
and got the following output:
[code]mke2fs 1.42.13 (17-May-2015)
/dev/sda3 contains a ext4 file system
created on Wed Feb 24 09:07:15 2016
fs_types for mke2fs.conf resolution: ‘ext4’
Filesystem label=Data1
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
Stride=0 blocks, Stripe width=0 blocks
27197440 inodes, 108783616 blocks
5439180 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
Maximum filesystem blocks=4294967296
3320 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
8192 inodes per group
Filesystem UUID: 3fd692fc-7ce0-443d-bc92-8b775b95551e
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208,
4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616, 78675968,
102400000
Running command: badblocks -b 4096 -X -s -w /dev/sda3 108783615
Testing with pattern 0xaa: done
Reading and comparing: done
Testing with pattern 0x55: done
Reading and comparing: done
Testing with pattern 0xff:done
Reading and comparing: done
Testing with pattern 0x00:done
Reading and comparing: done
Warning: the backup superblock/group descriptors at block 31457280 contain
bad blocks.
Allocating group tables: done
Writing inode tables: done
Creating journal (32768 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done[/code]
Given the warning, I have these questions:
-
Can I now use this newly formatted partition reliably, without losing data or encountering boot problems? (It took more than 10 hours to format it!)
-
If not, should I divide /dev/sda3 into two smaller partitions to avoid the bad blocks, and if so, how should I do it? (I am unfamiliar with disk geometries, etc.)
-
Or, should I replace the system disk instead? (It is 500 GB and would be wasted if I did not use the rest of it, despite the system partition on /dev/sda1 being robust at present.)