How to diagnose hdd health?

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Mon Apr 25 20:49:22 UTC 2005


On Mon, 2005-04-25 at 14:29, Arthur Pemberton wrote:
> What are the best way(s) to diagonose the health of a hdd, and not only 
> it's filesystem. Preferably, what 'Fedora abailable' commands can I use?

Use smartctl if the drive supports it.  If it doesn't, a brute force
nondestructive approach is to 'cat /dev/xxx >/dev/null' to force every
sector to be read and watch for error messages on the screen or logged
to /var/log/messages.  Or you could use the 'badblocks' program.

> I'm going to soon install some HDDs i had sittign around, and I just 
> wanted to know how to test them to see if they are any good, and how bad 
> they may be.

I usually low-level SCSI drives when moving them to a different
controller.  It's probably just superstition now but it used to
make a difference.  Or course you can't do that with IDE drives.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com





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