Okay, I've got a hard drive that might have a bad write head. But if it IS bad, it's only bad about 1 in 500 million times, in terms of individual bits(1s and 0s). So I'd never notice a problem in a text file, but it could easily screw up data for distributed computing.

So, unless there's a better program out there, I need help with a good combination of variables for the badblocks program. I read something about hard drive buffers, and I know very little about hard drives, so I'm hoping someone can feed me a command to try. The hard drive is about 120GB in size(base-10 GB, about 112GiB) and I think the first pass should trigger a mistake if the problem is truly the write head.

Lastly, don't worry about ruining the data on the drive. Anything that the drive had that was important is long gone, right now I just need to determine if I need to ditch the drive.(I mean recycle when I say ditch, I'm a good boy )