Hiya,
  There's a pretty cool Windows tool in "SpeedFan" that uses S.M.A.R.T. data.
S.M.A.R.T. enabled drives can report to the O.S. tons of run-time conditions.
These get compared to statistics in SpeedFan's tables to predict and chart failures.
The tables are stats amassed by the drive manufacturers and then built into SpeedFan's (upgrade-able) tables.
Totally non-destructive.

  I am not aware of any Linux equivalents.  But to be sure, they must be out there.

  (-:  Chas.M.  :-)
Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2010 13:26:47 -0700
Subject: Re: Looking For Software to Check A Hard Drive
From: mark@phillipsmarketing.biz
To: plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us

On Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 1:10 PM, Matt Graham <danceswithcrows@usa.net> wrote:
From: Mark Phillips <mark@phillipsmarketing.biz>
> I have an older hard drive (WD1200VE - 120 GB) However, I would like
> to test it (thoroughly, whatever that means) to see if it has any
> problems before I use it as a backup drive.

If you don't care about the data on the disk, plug it in, then in an xterm or
konsole or screen session, run "badblocks -s -w -o badblocks.out /dev/sdd1",
replacing sdd1 with whatever disk and partition# the drive shows up as.
This'll do a destructive read/write test on all sectors of the device.  It
will tie up the device, but all the other devices will remain usable, since
Linux does multitasking pretty well in most cases.  You could add "-p 1" to
make it do 2 passes if you really want to check it out.  If it does find bad
blocks, you can pass the badblocks.out file to mke2fs's -l option, which could
keep things usable.

Sounds good...will this also exercise the hardware enough to see if it has become flaky over the years? I have used floppy based drive testers that run for hours/days that also report if the drive is flaky over time with a lot of usage.

I guess I will need to reformat the drive once this test is done....correct? Or does it put the original data back?

Make sure you get the device name right.

Hmmmm..."measure twice, cut once" is my motto, and I usually only have a few scraps left over. It would be funny, in a sad way, to get the wrong drive.......

Thanks!

Mark


--
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see



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