Installing Ubuntu 10.10 and verifying the hard disk in the process

I have a 160GB hard drive with some bad blocks that I wish to install ubuntu onto. The installer does not have an option to verify the disk during formatting, so I needed to boot up the live cd to do that step myself. I had actually gone through the install already on this disk without marking the bad blocks, so there is a damaged file system on the disk due to the bad blocks.

After the initial installation round I have the partition table configured, so I just re-create the root filesystem with “mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1 -c -V” to get the blank root with all the bad blocks marked.

After making the file system, start the installer and tell it to do manual partitions, then tell it to use the freshly formatted partition as root and to not format it.

The rest of the install proceeds as normal.