Dead disk

[Dotan Cohen]

On 16/06/06, James Wilkinson <fedora at westexe.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> I asked:
> > * Have you tried booting into runlevel 3 and run as much as you know
> >   how to in text mode? Something involving /dev/urandom, bzip2 and cmp
> >   might be a good idea.
>
> Dotan Cohen wrote:
> > Could you elaborate a bit more on this? I'm araid that my power over
> > the command line is very limited. And I'm not exactly a CS major!
>
> Well, how often does the system crash if you just leave it alone in
> runlevel 5? It sounds like it's a few times an hour. If so, just leave
> it for three hours, and use the uptime command to make sure it hasn't
> crashed and rebooted.
>
> I would have suggested something like
>
> [james at kendrick tmp]$ dd if=/dev/urandom of=testcase bs=1M count=10
> 10+0 records in
> 10+0 records out
> 10485760 bytes (10 MB) copied, 3.32386 seconds, 3.2 MB/s
>
> to generate a 10 MB test case,
>
> [james at kendrick tmp]$ bzip2 -k testcase
>
> to bzip2 it (the -k keeps the original),
>
> [james at kendrick tmp]$ bzcat testcase.bz2 > testcase2
> [james at kendrick tmp]$ cmp testcase testcase2
>
> to uncompress it to a different file, and to check that the result is
> the same as the original.
>
> This ought to exercise the kernel, the processor, and memory. If you use
> a large enough testcase, it will exercise disk, as well.
>
> Or, if you've got space, you could just
> tar jcf ~/usr.tar.bz2 /usr
> to tar up the contents of /usr.
>
> Hope this helps,
>
> James.

Ah, I see what you're up to. I'll put the machine to work and see what
it does. If it crashes, in what logs should I look? I've already
peaked into most of what's in /var/log but didn't see anything that
looked like a crash report. But as that's the first time I've ever
looked at those logs, I could be wrong. I'm not familiar with them.

Dotan Cohen
http://what-is-what.com
33