badblocks -vw

[Mike McCarty]

Hadders wrote:
> Hi all,
>  Just wondering if there's something for friendly to use than badblocks 
> to test a disk?
> 
> Just doing a 'badblocks -vw /dev/sda' and it does 5 passes to ensure 
> it's good, but it doesn't tell you where it's at....
> 
> Does anybody use anything other than this to test a disk?
> Bought two new SATAII disks and want to make sure they're good before I 
> start using them.

You've got some misconceptions. Those drives do sector remapping. Using
read/write tests won't detect this, as the FEC on the discs will hide
the errors. You need to query the disc itself for the knowledge it
has.

# smartctl -a /dev/hdx
# hdparm -I /dev/hdx

may help.

Mike
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