For better or worse I’ve been needing to check drives for errors quite a bit recently and have been using the badblocks command to do it. It’s definitely a command that people should become familiar with. Where fsck checks the file system for problems, badblocks attempts to ascertain the status of physical media which can include hard disks, usb drives, and other usb devices such as media players. I’ve compiled a detailed list of commands I’ve been using.