Testing a hard drive?

Message

Negated Void · Post by **Negated Void** » Wed Jan 11, 2006 8:58 am

Hello!

How do i test a hard drive? I'm installing gentoo on a machine and it's coughing up on formatting the partitions - i think it may be just a bad block, but it could be far worse.

So.. how do i test a hard drive under linux? Can I run a surface-scan thinger for bad sectors, even though it's an unformatted drive? What about testing other attributes of the drive (and / or monitoring it's SMART data).

Perhaps something similar to memtest86?

--Matt

bus.dch · Post by **bus.dch** » Wed Jan 11, 2006 9:16 am

What you're looking for is the program "badblocks"

man badblocks

Or http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man8/badblocks.8.html

Although I've never run it on an entire block device (it's meant to be run on partitions) it should work.

You can configure SMART data with smartmontools:

man smartctl

smartctl -H /dev/hdXX

ph03n1x · Post by **ph03n1x** » Wed Jan 11, 2006 10:25 am

There's dozens of apps who can do that just have a look at packages.gentoo.org and use the search function...

Negated Void · Post by **Negated Void** » Wed Jan 11, 2006 4:28 pm

I see badblocks, trying that now.
Any of the others on the liveCD?

Testing a hard drive?

Testing a hard drive?

Re: badblocks