mbadblocks(1)

✨ mbadblocks — the girlies' guide to flagging bad blocks on ur floppy ✨

okay so bestie, welcome to mbadblocks(1) from the General Commands Manual 💖 this is the mtools girlie that tests a floppy disk and marks the bad blocks in the FAT. she's giving disk-detective energy and honestly? iconic 🕵️♀️✨

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⚠️ Note of warning (read this first fr fr) ⚠️

ngl this manpage has been automatically generated from mtools's texinfo documentation, and it may not be entirely accurate or complete 😭 so don't come for her if something's off. peep the end of this man page for the deets 👀

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🌸 Description 🌸

the mbadblocks command is used to mark some clusters on an MS-DOS filesystem bad 💀 she's got the following syntax:

mbadblocks [-s sectorlist|-c clusterlist|-w] drive:

if no command line flags are supplied, Mbadblocks scans an MS-DOS filesystem for bad blocks by simply trying to read them and flag them if read fails 🫶 all blocks that are unused are scanned, and if detected bad are marked as such in the FAT. no cap, that's the whole vibe.

this command is intended to be used right after mformat ✨ like, literally immediately. she is not intended to salvage data from bad disks — so do not expect her to rescue ur precious files, she's not that kind of main character 🙈

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🎀 Command line options 🎀

• -c file — use a list of bad clusters, rather than scanning for bad clusters itself. she'll trust ur list bestie 💅
• -s file — use a list of bad sectors (counted from beginning of filesystem), rather than trying for bad clusters itself. note the counting-from-the-beginning-of-the-filesystem thing, that part matters ⭐
• -w — write a random pattern to each cluster, then read it back and flag cluster as bad if mismatch 🔥 only free clusters are tested in such a way, so any file data is preserved 🫶 slay, safe queen.

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💀 Bugs 💀

Mbadblocks should (but doesn't yet :-( ) also try to salvage bad blocks which are in use by reading them repeatedly, and then mark them bad. so basically she's a work in progress, and the :-( is literally in the original, so we're all feeling that together 😭

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👑 See Also 👑

Mtools' texinfo doc 🌈

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📖 Viewing the texi doc 📖

this manpage has been automatically generated from mtools's texinfo documentation. however, this process is only approximative, and some items, such as crossreferences, footnotes and indices are lost in this translation process 😔 indeed, these items have no appropriate representation in the manpage format. moreover, not all information has been translated into the manpage version. thus I strongly advise you to use the original texinfo doc. see the end of this manpage for instructions how to view the texinfo doc.

• to generate a printable copy from the texinfo doc, run the following commands:

./configure; make dvi; dvips mtools.dvi

• to generate a html copy, run:

./configure; make html

a premade html can be found at http://www.gnu.org/software/mtools/manual/mtools.html

• to generate an info copy (browsable using emacs' info mode), run:

./configure; make info

the texinfo doc looks most pretty when printed or as html ✨ indeed, in the info version certain examples are difficult to read due to the quoting conventions used in info. so if u want the pretty version, go print or html, periodt 💅

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mtools-4.0.49 🦋 14Jun25 🦋 and that's the whole page bestie, mwah 💋 go forth and mark those bad blocks, u absolute icon 👑✨