On Wed, Oct 26, 2005 at 13:33:01 +0100, Ian Malone <ibm21@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Has anyone any suggestions for checking the physical > health of a hard disc? Something analogous to the > "surface scan" in Windows Scandisk? You should probably have smartd making regular checks of your disks. > 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. They may have been bad at one time and then reallocated by the disk. If a disk decides to reallocate a sector it needs to wait until it either gets a good read or for the sector to be rewritten. Once reallocation is done, the sectir that previously looked bad will be 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? You can look at the smartctl output to see how many reallocated sectors there are and if any of the other stats are below the fail threshold or if the disk itself says it is about to fail. If you get the data all copied off, then you might try running badblocks with one of the write options and have it make several passes over the disk. Then run a long smart self test and see how things look.
