All of the hard drive vendors provide disk drive diagnostic tools, that are able to access vendor-specific - and undocumented - firmware in their drives. This diagnostic firmware is able to diagnose drive hardware problems in a much more thorough way than the vendor-neutral S.M.A.R.T. is able to. These utilities are always provided in the form of DOS boot disk images; one generally has a choice of making a floppy or a CD-ROM. Some of the vendors also provide diagnostics that can run under Windows. But the advantage of the DOS boot disks (besides not having to run Windows), is that you can test your boot drive without having to disconnect it, and the test is performed on a completely quiescent system. The diagnostics are all quite easy to use. Generally there is a "short test" that just queries the diagnostic firmware, and a "long test" that does a non-destructive test by reading every sector on your drive. Some of the diagnostics also include a "drive exerciser" which tests the drive more rigorously by reading random sectors all over the drive. Finally they all have a destructive test, in which the diagnostic writes zeroes to every sector of the drive. No matter what, if you think one of your drives might be flaky, back them both up at once, before doing anything else. Being fully backed up also gives you the advantage that you can then run the destructive sector-zeroing test. I feel it's a good thing to do in any case, just to "exercise the bits". A while back I downloaded all the diagnostics from all the drive vendors, and burned a CD for each one. I also keep them around on a filesystem where I archive all my software installers. They're good things to have on hand. I realize that you're using a parallel cable. But a note for anyone else reading this, who wants to test an SATA drive. Recent versions of these utilities do support SATA, but they are only able to do so by embedded device drivers for every SATA controller in existence, in an executable that starts up from 16-bit DOS. My experience with the use of these for SATA drives, is that the diagnostics worked just fine for SATA controllers that were integrated with the motherboard. But when I tried to use a PCI SATA controller, the diagnostic couldn't find the drive. The vendor's tech support just told me that they didn't support PCI SATA controllers, and that I had to access SATA through the motherboard. Hope That Help, Don Quixote -- Don Quixote de la Mancha quixote@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.dulcineatech.com Dulcinea Technologies Corporation: Software of Elegance and Beauty. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
