On Wed, 26 Oct 2005, Ian Malone wrote:
Has anyone any suggestions for checking the physical health of a hard disc? Something analogous to the "surface scan" in Windows Scandisk? I've got a disc which has some sectors marked as bad by Windows scandisk, and has had them for quite a while (for no obvious reason; I think scandisk messed up at some point). smartctl for the drive is fine. Recently though I've suffered some filesystem problems. This could be a filesystem error, due to a scandisk crash which occured while checking or a bug in the vfat module (since the first I noticed it was after unzipping a file on the disc using linux and then rebooting into Windows). I'm currently taking steps to back up the data (and recover some of the lost stuff), but I'd like to have something solid to check whether I can trust it in future, any thoughts? (Apologies for any errors, rushed email)
$ man badblocks -- Matthew Saltzman Clemson University Math Sciences mjs AT clemson DOT edu http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs
