Let’s start by defining a bad sector/bad block, it is a section on a disk drive or flash memory that can no longer be read from or written to, which usually happens due to permanent physical damage on the disk surface or failing flash memory transistors.
As more bad sectors build up, they can seriously impact your storage device’s performance, reduce its capacity, or even lead to complete hardware failure.
It is also important to note that the presence of bad blocks should alert you to start thinking of getting a new disk drive or simply mark the bad blocks as unusable.
Therefore, in this article, we will go through the necessary steps that can enable you to determine the presence or absence of bad sectors on your Linux disk drive or flash memory using certain disk scanning utilities.