I'm trying to run badblocks on a drive with a single partition.  The drive contains a FreeBSD file system on it.I boot up using a Linux live USB drive.  The drive is unmounted.  The output of fdisk -l is:   Device  Boot     Start          End    Id     System/dev/sda1     *        63   976773167+    a5     FreeBSDSo I run:# badblocks -v /dev/sda1And it says:badblocks: invalid last block - /dev/sda1I can't find any useful information about this.  Am I using the badblocks utility correctly here?  Or is this an indication that something is wrong with the drive?
badblocks utility keeps reporting invalid last block
linux;badblocks
No, this isn't an indication something is wrong with the drive. You are getting this error because badblocks is accepting /dev/sda1 as the last-block argument instead of accepting it as the device.  The syntax in your question looks correct to me. Try specifying the last-block argument after the device:badblocks -v /dev/sda1 976773167 If that doesn't work, try adding the first-block to that as well:badblocks -v /dev/sda1 976773167 63 Just to assure you that this does not indicate something is wrong with your drive, here is the output when I add an invalid last-block argument nope:  sudo badblocks -v /dev/sdb1 nope  badblocks: invalid last block - nope  Here is an example from my bash history of the last time I used badblocks (sudo access is required to access these drives on my system):sudo badblocks -v /dev/sdb1 Output:Checking blocks 0 to 976751967  Checking for bad blocks (read-only test):If I cancel the process after awhile with Ctrl+C the output is:Interrupted at block 7470720Here is the syntax to resume the process (see man badblocks):badblocks -v device  [ last-block ] [ first-block ] The last-block is the last block to be read on the device and first-block is where it should start reading. Example:sudo badblocks -v /dev/sdb1 976751967 7470720 Output:Checking blocks 7470720 to 976751967 Checking for bad blocks  (read-only test):