Bruno Wolff III wrote:
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.
Worth doing, I'll look into it.
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.
They got marked bad fairly early in its life and (as you
refer to below), there are no reallocated blocks. Coupled
with the fact that my Windows install isn't 100% stable
it makes me suspect they weren't bad in the first place.
But they also make me a bit cautious as to whether
something funny is happening.
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.
All are above fail threshold, in fact they all look
a little too good for a 2+ year old disc.
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.
badblocks sounds like what I'm looking for, thanks. I
did an extended self test yesterday with no complaints.
--
imalone
