hard disc health checks

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Wed, 26 Oct 2005, Ian Malone wrote:

> Has anyone any suggestions for checking the physical
> health of a hard disc?  Something analogous to the
> "surface scan" in Windows Scandisk?
>
> I've got a disc which has some sectors marked as bad
> by  Windows scandisk, and has had them for quite a
> while (for no obvious reason; I think scandisk messed
> up at some point).  smartctl for the drive is fine.
> Recently though I've suffered some filesystem
> problems.  This could be a filesystem error, due to
> a scandisk crash which occured while checking or a
> bug in the vfat module (since the first I noticed it
> was after unzipping a file on the disc using linux
> and then rebooting into Windows).
>
> I'm currently taking steps to back up the data (and
> recover some of the lost stuff), but I'd like to
> have something solid to check whether I can trust it
> in future, any thoughts?
>
> (Apologies for any errors, rushed email)

$ man badblocks

-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs