System booted via antiX-13.1-Full ISO

When offered the option by the installer, GParted was run to replace the existing single NTFS partition on the hard disk with two ext4 partitions (/ and /home).

At a later stage the installer offers an option to check for bad blocks and advises that this will take longer than not doing so. Selecting the option to do the check results in the installation process stalling. The disk activity LED does not flash as normally expected. After a very long time waiting a manual power down is required.

Repeating the installation, but not enabling the check for bad blocks, it proceeds and completes as expected.

Just guessing here, might the matter be connected to the symptoms reported in this post?
post30249.html#p30249

If the -c parameter is given twice to mke2fs then it will take many hours to run. It reads and writes the entire partition using different patterns each time. If you want to do this test, you might be better off doing it from the command line (where there is occasional feedback). If you are using a GUI program then look around and see if you can get a display of command line output as it is running.

If you have space on your drive, make a small partition and then use mke2fs with"-c -c" and measure how long it takes. Then use this time to extrapolate to how long it will take with on the partition you want to check.

The speed increase of hard drives
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/15-years-of-hard-drive-history,1368-7.html"
linktext was:"has not kept pace with size increase"
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. A quick glance at that article says the speed has increased by a factor of 100 while the size has increased by a factor of 20,000. On the next page it says the time to read a full platter has increased from 37 seconds to 52 minutes. This is one of the few areas where, by some metrics, computers having gotten much much slower. Since that article was written in 2006, I expect things are even worse today.

Perhaps it appears to fail when in fact is working. If this is the case the issue is one of feedback rather than one of correct operation.

How about some form of visual representation of the action underway? Maybe something along the following lines in the installer GUI

• Display a horizontal progress bar
• Advance the progress bar in 1% increments
• In the center of the bar display the % complete
• Underneath the bar indicate the estimated time to end of checking
• Count down the estimated time in 1 second decrements
• Provide a cancel button (for when the time to completeion is too great)
• The cancel button to return to the previous screen (to allow formatting without checking)

Perhaps some of the info can be drawn from the feedback provided by mke2fs

• The % complete is already displayed
• A time elapsed is shown. This would be better showing a decreasing value. It might be possible to measure the progress over a very short period and extrapolate this, then count down from extrapolation.

In cases where an external tool such as MHDD (or similar) is used before the antiX installer to identify and remap bad blocks, will the antiX installer respect the remapping?