Analyze the disk in HPUX

[cnhpux01]

Hi,

in HPUX, is there command or utility that can run to analyze the hard disk?

Like Solaris, the format command can run to analyze the drive.

Thanks,

-C

[Matti_Kurkela]

Which HP-UX version?

In general, the on-line diagnostics tools can get some disk health information.

In HP-UX 11.11 and 11.23, this would be the cstm/mstm/xstm commands.

Modern disks (basically everything manufactured since year 1995 at least) have a built-in hidden reserve of spare sectors: as long as this reserve has not run out, the disk should have no bad blocks visible to the OS. The presence of bad blocks usually indicates this reserve has already been exhausted, so the disk already has a pretty severe fault.

A basic check would be to read the whole disk using the dd command and see if it causes any errors, either on the command line or in the syslog:

dd if=<disk device> of=/dev/zero bs=1024k
more /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log