badblocks -vw

[Hadders]

Mike McCarty wrote:
> 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
Okay, that makes sense. But I need to write something to them to have 
the FEC detect a failure and remap it?

H