umount

[kitepilot at kitepilot.com]

'Unplugging without mounting' may leave the filesystem in inconsistent state 
that only needs software to fix. 

If you want to validate hardware via brute force try:
dd if=/dev/<your HD device> of=/dev/null
that will read the device track by track on its entirety.
If you want a deeper check (and can afford to erase the drive) try:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<your HD device>
that will write binary zeroes all over the drive, what was years past a 'low 
level format' 

If you get exasperated, just shoot the damn thing and buy another one...   
:) 

The test that you are running may take a lifetime.  Those are very through 
but they were designed when a 100 MB (yes, MB, *NOT* GB) was big.
Now that the sizes are orders of magnitude bigger, the times are 
exponentially larger.
Grab a beer and forget about it...
ET 


Michael writes: 

> I was wondering hpow many cycles does it run through? this stupid thing has
> run almost 4 hours nnow an test 2 patterns! I'm going to bed! 
> 
> On Sat, Dec 17, 2016 at 1:36 AM, Michael <bmike1 at gmail.com> wrote: 
> 
>> Well.... I was having difficultie unmounting an auto-mounteddrive to run
>> badblocks but I figured that out..... anyways so far two passes have
>> completed withno errors. I was thinking that the reason it failed  was
>> because I had unplugged it w umount first/shouldn't it not fail ifI
>> accidently  do that? 
>>
>  
> 
> 
> -- 
> :-)~MIKE~(-: