I need to find out the location of every last bad sector on this drive. I'm tired of getting trolled. The best help I've had thus far in Linux is journalctl because it screams the sector number every time there's an error, but I don't know how to make it save the sectors to a file. I'm sure there's a way to make a script to persistently scan journalctl while I abuse the drive and extract the sectors from there but I would have no clue how to do that. Perhaps there's some other tool already made for this purpose?

Thanks in advance!

First: On many, perhaps most, modern devices you do not need to do that. If they are S.M.A.R.T. technology compliant they self-detect and remap bad sectors and many low level tools do not report the remapping, you need the SMARTMON toolset, with which you can see the reported block reports for the information.

See this page for SMART tool hints https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-check...using-smartctl

If you run the information option and discover you have a device that is not SMART, then you need other tools.

Please verify what you are working with first. The report, replacing 'whatever' with the real device name for the drive in the following command should give us that information You can use the "blkid" report to find the real device name.

Perhaps the OP should describe their menagerie of "devices" first - previous threads may give some idea, but who knows.

Oh yeah no I'm way past SMART. For some reason it only has a limited number of remappable sectors, after those are gone you're on your own. If I can't remap them then I'll just avoid going anywhere near them... unless perhaps there's some software remapping technology I'm not aware of?

edit: also yeah what @syg00 said LOL these drives are begging me to just let them die, and yes there are bad sectors but what about the good sectors? They deserve to continue serving. I might even pull up to guiness records one day and see if they have one for the most horrible SMART history in a still functioning drive, who knows I might get rich

The SMART utilities can still test your drive and report bad sectors, both remapped and current.
If you have a device that does not support SMART, then the vendors disk utilities would be the software of choice.

If bad sectors are propagating, then it is likely you have surface rust flaking and floating around in there, and should retire the drive anyway. Your data is not secure, and you cannot depend upon any disk utility or scan to tell you where the next rash of bad sectors will suddenly appear.

I eyeball it.

Take a look at a ddrescue mapfile. Maybe you could use what it contains.

If the drive has already remapped all the available sectors as reported in smartctl then the only intelligent thing for a user to do is replace the drive. Bad sectors continuing to develop is 100% indication of progressive drive failure and it is only a matter of time until the drive is totally unusable -- with the inevitable loss of data.

I strongly suggest immediate drive replacement to avoid a potential total failure at the worst possible time.

The 'badblocks' command can do some of what you ask, but does not preclude further failure.

If the bad block replacement mechanism has reached its limit, my suggestion would be to buy the replacement drive, remount the failing one as read-only, and begin copying everything to the new disk. And soon.