[PLUG] Looking For Software to Check A Hard Drive

Mark Phillips mark at phillipsmarketing.biz
Sat Dec 18 23:19:01 UTC 2010


I have an older hard drive (WD1200VE - 120 GB) that use to be in my laptop,
but I ran out of room so I replaced it with a larger drive. I have the
WD1200 in one of those nifty ez-upgrade USB drive enclosures and it mounts
and works just fine. I need some portable back up space, so I thought I
would use this drive. 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.
I am looking for either a command line tool or gui that I can run on a
Debian machine to exercise the drive and find any errors. An automated test
suite that I can setup and run in the background (ie does not suck up the
whole machine to run it) for a few hours/days to test the drive, log errors,
fix those errors that can be fixed, etc.

I can't use the WD diags for the drive since my Windows machine will not
recognize the drive in its usb caddy. I looked at bonnie++ and I can't find
a way to tell it to test a usb drive instead of the drive with the root file
system. Bonnie is also a benchmarking program and not really a drive stress
test program.

Any recommendations? I don't care about the data on the drive now, as I have
sucked it all off to my new hard drive.

Thanks!

Mark



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