15
Mar
Posted by Derek@TheDailyLinux in Tips and Tricks » 3 Comments » 

Write To or Read From a Given Sector Using dd

This comes in handy when trying to troubleshoot a drive. If you’re met with an error message like “I/O Error: Bad sector 40003″, then you can use ‘dd’ to verify that it’s bad. For example, to write to a given sector/block, use the following command:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdb seek=<sector_number> count=1 bs=512

To read from a given sector/block, use the following command (skip instead of seek):

dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/null skip=<sector_number> count=1 bs=512

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There's 3 Comments So Far

  • Yakov
    April 4th, 2012 at 4:46 am

    Does it work if your sector size differs from 512 byte?

  • JC
    July 1st, 2012 at 1:27 pm

    If your sector size differs you’ll have to change bs=(your sector size).

  • TecnoFocus
    January 25th, 2013 at 12:56 pm

    Thanks!! exactly what i m looking for!

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