I've been having trouble with a fresh install of Zorin Lite that is probably related to bad sectors on the hard drive (1TB).
Would these tools and techniques be able to allow Zorin to use just the good sectors/blocks of the hard drive? (Maybe that's what you meant with "the non-destructive write test on a bad block should trigger the drive to remap that block" but I'm not sure.)
Trying it now from Zorin Lite live USB.
After changing to the correct letter for my drive ("sda" not "sdf") got the result of 4096. Same for sda1 (the EFI partition) and sda2 (the main partition).
So then I did:
sudo badblocks -b 4096 -svn /dev/sda
Ran for hours, showing ever increasing numbers up to 244190645. Then:
done
Pass completed, 244190646 bad blocks found. (244190646/0/0 errors)
Does that mean every single block is bad???