Looking For Software to Check A Hard Drive

[Matt Graham]

From: Mark Phillips <mark at phillipsmarketing.biz>
> I have an older hard drive (WD1200VE - 120 GB) However, I would like
> to test it (thoroughly, whatever that means) to see if it has any
> problems before I use it as a backup drive.

If you don't care about the data on the disk, plug it in, then in an xterm or
konsole or screen session, run "badblocks -s -w -o badblocks.out /dev/sdd1",
replacing sdd1 with whatever disk and partition# the drive shows up as. 
This'll do a destructive read/write test on all sectors of the device.  It
will tie up the device, but all the other devices will remain usable, since
Linux does multitasking pretty well in most cases.  You could add "-p 1" to
make it do 2 passes if you really want to check it out.  If it does find bad
blocks, you can pass the badblocks.out file to mke2fs's -l option, which could
keep things usable.

Make sure you get the device name right.  

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see