Wednesday, February 19, 2014

badblocks: says it is not safe to run and stops

Symptoms:

When checking for bad blocks, following error is displayed:

# badblocks -nvs /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb is apparently in use by the system; it's not safe to run badblocks!

Solution:

  1. Check the mounts (/etc/mtab), unmount with umount
  2. Check the swaps (/proc/swaps), unmount with swapoff
  3. Check volume groups (/dev/mapper/...), deactivate with vgchange -a n
Posted by at

5 comments:

  1. AnonymousJune 30, 2014 at 8:17 PM

    This was helpful. I had originally checked only for conditions 1 and 2 and was stumped. Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousFebruary 9, 2016 at 12:55 PM

    4. Check software RAID (/proc/mdstat), stop with mdadm

    ReplyDelete
  3. TejasAugust 1, 2016 at 12:02 PM

    Thanks @Martin Žember, it works

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousJanuary 18, 2019 at 11:28 PM

    Thanks, this helped me out alot. :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousFebruary 1, 2020 at 12:28 PM

    Thanks! But I found you too late, hopefully forced execute won't break the stick...

    If the tool could just say, where exactly the drive is used, it would much better in terms of UX.

    ReplyDelete

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