How to diagnose hdd health?

[Rick Stevens]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> 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.

Yes you can, if you use the appropriate tool.  There's lots of low-level
formatters and testers on the Ultimate Boot CD, for example.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
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-           grep me no patterns and I'll tell you no lines           -
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