[PLUG] Looking For Software to Check A Hard Drive

Matt McKenzie lnxknight at gmail.com
Sun Dec 19 17:27:08 UTC 2010


I don't see any one yet recommending the Drive Fitness Test, it works with
many brands of drives, but I think is made by Hitachi.
It is one of the options available on the Ultimate Boot CD (
www.ultimatebootcd.com), as well as elsewhere.  On the UBCD it is very easy
to use though and you don't have to mess with creating a boot floppy or some
such.  Plus there are many other good tools on there, including other drive
diag tools, memory test, etc.
I used it daily when I was working as a bench tech.

You will need to mount the drive as a secondary, it will not work in a USB
caddy, none of the drive diags I know of work through USB.
Just power down, open the machine, and connect the cables temporarily and
lay the drive down in a convenient spot, run the tests, then power down and
disconnect again.

The DFT has a quick mode, and a long mode.  Quick mode just does a few
checks, long mode does a thorough media analysis.

This is to check the physical drive and not the filesystem, which sounds
like it is what you want.

HTH

----------
Matt M.
LinuxKnight


On Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 3:19 PM, Mark Phillips
<mark at phillipsmarketing.biz>wrote:

> 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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