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linux tool to check hard drive?

ivwshane

ivwshane

Lifer
My hard drive just doesn't sound right to me but it's not making any sounds I've heard before that are related to a dying hard drive. The drive is an old seagate 8GB drive (so I doubt its s.m.a.r.t. enabled).

Is there tool I can use that will tell me the status or do a diagnostic of the drive to see if there is anything wrong?
 
The fsck for ext2/ext3 include a option to run a badblock scan on a partition. It's the -c option. The FS will need to be mounted read-only (try rebooting into single-user mode) or you can run it from a knoppix cdrom or whatnot.

Otherwise there is a badblock command, I beleive. It's what fsck uses.
 
I'll probably just use the seagate disks then since I don't have cd rom. I was hoping more for something that didn't require me to take the system off line.
 
You can run badblocks in read-only mode while the system is running, also smartmontools is worth a try since it will tell you if it does have SMART capabilities and if so it'll let you run internal tests.
 
yes.. I agreed with "missing ghost member" .. if your running winXP and your dying 8GB is one of the drive mounted.. i would suggest downloading SPEEDFAN cuz it will tell u all the info you need.. such as the remaining lifespan of your drive and such.
 
Originally posted by: logicmaster2003
yes.. I agreed with "missing ghost member" .. if your running winXP and your dying 8GB is one of the drive mounted.. i would suggest downloading SPEEDFAN cuz it will tell u all the info you need.. such as the remaining lifespan of your drive and such.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't trust any application that claims to be able to tell me what the the life span of my harddrive is... becuase I know it's full of crap by default.

Badblock is reliable because if you have lots of bad blocks that need to be mapped around then you know your drive is dying and it should be replaced ASAP. There is no way to accurately tell how much life there is left to a drive.

Otherwise if your using a drive that supports SMART there are on-drive diagnostics and error records that can be accessed via smart utilities. You can run tests and see logs as well as some other items that can help you to more accurately determine the condition of your drive. This is very preferable.
 
there are over 1000 linux distros available.. some are multimedia-oriented , office-oriented, game-oriented, network-oriented..

so I wonder if theres one thats harddrive-utility-oriented ? meaning all it does ( live-cd ) is to monitor/analyze/fix/partition harddrives.
 
Knoppix should provide most of what you'd ever need. If it doesn't have it then Knoppix will actually allow you to download and install applications from Debian repositories and such. It has the UnionFS so that you can actually install software on a live cd without touching the harddrive. It's kinda neat.
 
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