Sometimes I find myself in need of a disk checking utility that can check both disks with known *and unknown* filesystems, and/or that can check even currently unpartitioned space on a disk.
There exists such a program for Linux, called badblocks: http://www.linuxmanpages.com/man8/badblocks.8.php A command of "badblocks -svn /dev/devicename" allows me to scan all kinds of disks, even some of these old Macintosh floppies and other esoteric stuff. The "n" is for a non-destructive read and write scan. Basically it scans the entire disk, and doesn't care what's on it, it just reads every single bit of data on the device, then does its write test and write back the original data. Sure, fsck can also scan disks, but AFAIK it can't do a surface scan, much less of an unknown file system, because fsck only "invokes file-system-specific programs". Thus far, I've mostly booted Linux Live-CDs and then issued "badblocks -svn /dev/devicename" whenever I needed to do such checks. Is there a way to do the same thing with OpenBSD? I am not a programmer, and anything exceeding script-kiddie level scripting will probably be over my head. Many thanks and kind regards, --ropers
