I tried badblocks last night. I didn't realize how long it would take. After over 3
hours, I had to abort it to do something else.
This morning, I retried it, this time with options to show its progress. It took between
3 1/2 and 3 3/4 hours. Here are the results:
===============
bash.3[~]: badblocks -s -v /dev/sda
Checking blocks 0 to 1953514583
Checking for bad blocks (read-only test): done
Pass completed, 0 bad blocks found. (0/0/0 errors)
bash.4[~]:
===============
I don't think this completely rules out the hard drive as the villain, but it's
now less of a suspect. Am I correct in guessing that the non-destructive read-write
option (option "-n") would take over twice as long (7 1/2 or more hours)?
Thanks,
Bill.