[jggimi]

Originally Posted by sepuku

I installed sleuth kit but couldn't get the autopsy add-on.

It is available for download at www.sleuthkit.org -- but now this is entirely academic. Your reformatting has effectively eliminated most data recovery.

...Since i got tired i decided to format it via windows(the only OS that i was able to format it,it allowed only ntfs formatting and that's what i did).Then attached it to ubuntu to format it to msdos and format was successful.

Once again, you have violated standards by having a FAT filesystem in an NTFS partition. This is not best practice, since, as I described earlier, and you also discovered, you will never be able to use it with Windows.

Since you have an NTFS partition, you would have to use the Windows Disk Management applet to repartition the drive, and establish a FAT MBR partition instead. (From Windows XP, this is: Control Panel....System and Maintenance....Administrative Tools....Computer Management...Storage...Disk Management.)

Before i insert any data to it,i would like to ask if it is a good idea to format it under ubuntu?Would it be better if i just formated it under OBSD?

Neither. Both of these operating systems allow the admin to violate standards, due to a lack of knowledge.

I recommend using Windows Disk Management to repartition the drive and reformat it.

And generally what is your opinion about trusting this disk?should i consider buying a new one?If yes should i consider some specific brands since i won't it work well with OBSD,Linux and windows?

We know that there are, or were, some failed sectors. However, your reformat was likely "quick" and did not write over every sector, only laying down the minimum NTFS filesystem metadata for an "empty" 2TB drive, then having the same thing done for a FAT filesystem.

Until you have written and read to every sector successfully, and proven that there are no more "offline uncorrectable" or "pending" sectors reported by SMART, this drive is not to be trusted.

I cannot tell what problems this drive has, other than the bad sectors. I do not understand why dd and fdisk on OpenBSD have failed for you. I suspect a PEBKAC, as you know.

The typical recommendation to "cleanse" a disk of bad sectors is write to every sector, then read from every sector, then check SMART status. A lot of admins use dd for this purpose, something like this:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rsd0c bs=1m conv=noerror
# dd if=/dev/rsd0c of=/dev/null bs=1m conv=noerror
# smartctl -a /dev/sd0c

But since dd hasn't been working for you even to read a single sector... there is another tool which can do this more robustly: the badblocks program, which is part of the e2fsprogs package. Your ubuntu system may have it installed already.