Disk Tools.
May. 2nd, 2006 01:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swestrupSome time ago, my webserver developed a number of hard sector errors on one of its raid drives. We pulled the drive, bought a couple of replacements and rebuilt the raid. Ever since the pulled drive has been sitting under my desk with a 'DEAD' sticker on it.
But, its not really dead that witch can eternal lie, and with strange eons even death may die, or something. Anyway, I stuck in in my main XP machine yesterday because we were using its removable drive tray to check out another drive anyway.
So, its been reformatted and its had a bad-sector check done on it, but being a Microsoft product XP isn't exactly verbose about the results of a bad-sector check. All it says is that 'bad sectors have been marked.' AFAICT the drive hasn't lost many sectors as the free space is the same as before.
I would love to have a spare 160 GB drive to store stuff on, but I would hate to have it die on me once I started to rely on it.
The only tool I know that can do a thorough check on a drive is spinright, and its a) dos only and b) will take something like a week to run on a 160GB drive. Now, I have the parts of a spare machine I might be able to put together to test it, (so I'm not out a machine for a week) but no spare monitor right now, so that gets difficult.
Does anyone know of any decent diagnostic tools for checking the reliability of a drive? I'll take any suggestions for Linux- or MS-based free tools. The last time I looked, I didn't find anything decent for either platform.
But, its not really dead that witch can eternal lie, and with strange eons even death may die, or something. Anyway, I stuck in in my main XP machine yesterday because we were using its removable drive tray to check out another drive anyway.
So, its been reformatted and its had a bad-sector check done on it, but being a Microsoft product XP isn't exactly verbose about the results of a bad-sector check. All it says is that 'bad sectors have been marked.' AFAICT the drive hasn't lost many sectors as the free space is the same as before.
I would love to have a spare 160 GB drive to store stuff on, but I would hate to have it die on me once I started to rely on it.
The only tool I know that can do a thorough check on a drive is spinright, and its a) dos only and b) will take something like a week to run on a 160GB drive. Now, I have the parts of a spare machine I might be able to put together to test it, (so I'm not out a machine for a week) but no spare monitor right now, so that gets difficult.
Does anyone know of any decent diagnostic tools for checking the reliability of a drive? I'll take any suggestions for Linux- or MS-based free tools. The last time I looked, I didn't find anything decent for either platform.
