On 08/10/05, Kurt Wall wrote:

On Fri, Oct 07, 2005 at 04:11:33PM -0400, Jerry Feldman took 28 lines to write:

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On Friday 07 October 2005 3:22 pm, Bruce Samhaber wrote:

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Is there a utility to check a harddisk integrity and to perhaps block off bad sections of the disk? I have been looking but have not found it in the SUSE books and Help Centre. I thought that I had seen this before. Something in the basic bootup? Yes. As was mentioned, badblocks is one utility, but the main utility is fsck. fsck is called everytime a system transitions from single user to multi-user (eg. everytime you boot essentially). Each filesystem (eg. ext3, Reiserfs) maintains its own set of utilities that are called by fsck.

You can do a man fsck, man fsck.ext3, man fsck.reiserfs (eg reiserfsck).

Perniciously incorrect. fsck checks the integrity of filesystems. It does not identify and mark bad blocks on the disk, which is what the OP wanted.

Kurt -- E Pluribus Unix

What is wrong with downloading the drive manufacturers own disk checking software? It is, after all, tailored to that specific make of disk. Most are now OS independent too. -- ============================================== I am only human, please forgive me if I make a mistake it is not deliberate. ============================================== Take care. Kevan Farmer 34 Hill Street Cheslyn Hay Staffordshire WS6 7HR

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Saturday 2005-10-08 at 08:52 -0400, Jerry Feldman wrote:

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Perniciously incorrect. fsck checks the integrity of filesystems. It does not identify and mark bad blocks on the disk, which is what the OP wanted. His question included both. The badblock question was answered, which is why I referred to the fact that it was answered.

You are forgetting that badblocks can be marked/remapped at a lower level, idependent of the filesystem or OS. The HD itself can do it on its own. There is smartctl, an utility that amongst other things can fire up the SMART tests of the HD, done by the HD firmware: the test can run while the system is up and running with no interference (a slower disk response till it finishes). The manufacturer utility mainly checks this tests as well. - -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76 iD8DBQFDR/uItTMYHG2NR9URArVkAKCQ5K60KUMGtW5xs1Eb4AoU/1YPYgCfaR4u 5iQoE+2Ty4MLLEj4W3K19ms= =WNmr -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Sunday 2005-10-09 at 08:55 -0400, Jerry Feldman wrote:

The manufacturer's utility is a very useful product to have.

I know. But you can not trust them blindly. Seagate's utility told me to return my HD to the manufacturer, because it was bad. I didn't, and it is still working 10000 hours later. Interestingly, if I run the same utility again it doesn't find any fault whatsoever. It was just complaining because there were some bad blocks that had not been remapped yet (the remapping occurs while writing, not on reads).

I found years back that some drives had not been properly checked for bad blocks. One word of caution is that these utilities can cause destruction of data since they don't really care about the high level formatting.

Seagate's warn about those tests.

But, the file system utilities (Reiserfsck et. al) can also be destructive.

Right. - -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76 iD8DBQFDSSZ5tTMYHG2NR9URApxuAJ4sVpRKcdsygfo5quJeZMZqvcJAowCfbKkG SIz1mbF+k6K5HeVXp3i3+AY= =xQ1E -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----