"Has Your Data Been Saved?" -- Saint $ilicon Have You Got Religion? If you didn't have Religion before, I bet you do now! Just a week or so ago there was a thread on this list started by someone who had a very slow hard drive, that turned out to be failing some tests. Your BIOS test is very little more than a basic sanity check. All it is really able to do is check whether your disk is working at all. It would detect a fried controller board or an improperly seated cable, but if the magnetic coating on your platter were getting divots in it, the BIOS test wouldn't detect it at all. While I know that it's not PC to recommend completely Non-Free software, for something like disk drive diagnostics, you really want to use the diagnostic tools provided by the vendor of your particular hard disk. Every disk drive manufacturer provides these tools as a free download from their website. Most of the tools come in the form of floppy disk images or CD ISO images. You write the image to the appropriate kind of disk, then boot off of it into DOS, DR-DOS or FreeDOS. The actual diagnostic tool is a DOS .exe program. Some of the tools also come in the form of Windows installers, but those won't work when you need to test your boot drive. You should be able to find out who made your drive by doing: $ dmesg | less and then examining the messages until you find a mention of your drive. The reason the vendor-specific drive utilities are so important is that every hard drive contains some proprietary firmware that is almost certainly completely undocumented, or else available only under a Non-Disclosure Agreement. These diagnostic boot disks will tell that proprietary firmware to self-test your drive in ways that S.M.A.R.T. simply is unable to, because these tests access stuff like the JTAG self-test functions of each individual chip in your drive's controller board. Generally there is a short test, a non-destructive basic test, a non-destructive long test, and a destructive test that writes zeroes to every sector of the drive. The short test is the one that will access the JTAG functions of all your chips - this test only lasts a few seconds. If any of these tests fail, don't wait another minute! Back up your drive *completely* and replace it. Your data is worth far, far more than any amount of money that you paid for your laptop. A brand-new 2.5" SATA drive that is a lot bigger than your current drive will only set you back a hundred bucks. If your laptop is old, and so uses parallel IDE, it is quite likely that your drive mechanism is simply worn out. It's harder to find 2.5" parallel IDE drives these days, but they can still be had and again are inexpensive. Because I am often called upon to rescue borked boxes for my friends and family, so I make it a practice to keep a CD binder with the very latest diagnostic tools from all the different drive vendors - there are only a few anymore - as well as both Memtest86, Memtest86+ and Memtest OS X. Whenever some panicked relative wakes me with a late-night phone call because they can't open their Excel spreadsheets anymore, the first thing I do is run one of the memory tests, with the drive test being second. I also keep current copies of the SystemRescueCd, which is a Linux boot CD full of disk utilities - it is meant specifically to repair busted Windows boxes, and quite handily, has a Linux tool that you can use to reset the Windows NT Administrator Password on all of your co-workers boxes, that you may watch hilarity ensue. The final component of my rescue toolkit is an external drive. A USB enclosure with a 2.5" SATA drive is just about always sufficient, but just to make sure I can connect to just about anything, I pay extra for enclosures that provide USB2, FireWire 400 (1394a) and eSATA. If it turns out that I can't just fixed the problem, I am able to run a full backup under SystemRescueCd to the external drive, then either reformat and reinstall the failed system, or remove the failed drive completely and replace it with a brand new one. I'm gonna write this all up in a more coherent and detailed way and post it on my website: http://www.dulcineatech.com/ I'll post the link here when it's online. But probably not until this weekend. 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/Mailing_list_guidelines
