Check Hard Disk for damaged sectors

['chris']

hi

Howto check Hard Disk for damaged sectors?
I've tried to format 80GB IDE Hard Disk using gparted, but it was to quick.

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

Shalom,

dd

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null bs=1024

If you have i/o errors, you have bad sectors.

SEP

[David Claypool]

IDE drives don't give you access to actual sectors. They manage and remap to spares anything that exhibits any anomaly.

[Sheldon Smith]

Get a copy of SpinRite.
http://grc.com

[Michal Kapalka (mikap)]

hi,


To check if a harddisk is in good shape,
you can use its SMART capabilities:

smartctl -t long /dev/hda

To check for bad sectors, use

badblocks -sv /dev/hda


mikap

['chris']

Thx, but does this command:

badblocks -sv /dev/hda

just checking (reading) without damaging data from the Hard disk?

[Huc_1]

Yes "Badblocks -sv /dev/hda " is readonly
The man page say's so (on ext2 and ext3)

Only the -n and -w (mutually exclusive) will write to disk ...

-w BEWARE WILL DESTROY ALL THE DATA ON YOUR DISK,

-n is "safer"

------- extract from man page badblocks -----

-n Use non-destructive read-write mode. By default only a non-
destructive read-only test is done. This option must not be
combined with the -w option, as they are mutually exclusive.

------- End of extract from man page --------

Just to test this i tried badblocks -sv on a spare disk (ext2 with some data on it), be patient this does take a long time.

# badblocks -sv /dev/sdb
Checking blocks 0 to 17716607
Checking for bad blocks (read-only test): done
Pass completed, 0 bad blocks found.

In my this case no badblocks and my filesystem did survive this test !

as a side point how reliable is this I don't really know and lot of other thinks beside bad blocks could be wrong with a hard disk the controller electronic could also be wrong!

Enjoy life.

Jean-Pierre Huc