Looking For Software to Check A Hard Drive

[Eric Shubert]

On 12/18/2010 01:26 PM, Mark Phillips wrote:
>
> Sounds good...will this also exercise the hardware enough to see if it
> has become flaky over the years? I have used floppy based drive testers
> that run for hours/days that also report if the drive is flaky over time
> with a lot of usage.

SMART will show such history.

> I guess I will need to reformat the drive once this test is
> done....correct? Or does it put the original data back?

The data is (essentially) destroyed. FWIW, the mke2fs command has -c 
(and -c -c) flags which invoke the badblocks command before formatting 
the drive. See "man mke2fs".

-- 
-Eric 'shubes'