# How to repair corrupted external hard drive in Ubuntu 12.04 ?



## trublu (Aug 17, 2012)

My friend has a Seagate FreeAgent Go external hard drive, which has probably developed some bad sectors, and isn't getting detected in Windows. The drive shows up in device manager, but doesn't show up in the list of drives in "My Computer". So I can't repair it using Windows.

It doesn't show up in Ubuntu either ( or does it? ) - I'm confused about this, since the sticker on the drive says it's 500 GB, but the Ubuntu disk utility detects a 2.2 TB drive 

BTW, _disks_ utility says there is one bad sector on this hard drive. I tried to do a _sudo badblocks_, but it seems to be taking ages to complete. 

What should I do?

EDIT : I tried to run a SMART self-test, but got this error :

"sk_disk_smart_self_test: Operation not supported (udisks-error-quark, 0)"

Looks like I have posted this in the wrong section. Mods - can you help move this to the hardware section?


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## JojoTheDragon (Aug 18, 2012)

Is the drive in windows supported format ?


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## trublu (Aug 18, 2012)

Yes. The guy who owns it uses Windows only  .


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## d6bmg (Aug 20, 2012)

Generally SMART isn't supported by external HDDs. You need to run sudo badblocks. As it is 2TB HDD, it will take time. AFAIK, there is no other way.


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