-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Sunday, 2009-07-05 at 00:10 +0100, David Bolt wrote:
There are also the SMART tests, using smartctl, or the utility from the manufacturer. Format is irrelevant, and can be tested "live".
And those tests can take considerably less time than a run through with badblocks. Only problem is it doesn't test the drive surface, but does tell you if the drive thinks it's failing.
It depends on the manufacturer and the date; seagates do.
I think we may not be thinking about the same thing here. I was thinking about the SMART tests when I said they don't do a surface scan.
Right. But, for example, the seagate drives I have bought since two or four years back do run a surface test as part of the smart tests done by the HD firmware. It is easy to notice because they take about two hours to test, and the system becomes highly unresponsive during that time (too busy). I only know it is a non destructive test, but I don't know if it is read only or read/write.
I know the manufacturers utilities do because I've used a couple of them. The last on a 200GB Maxtor that decided to die very nastily just outside its warranty period. Even using the utility to reformat the drive didn't help and, after it complained that the drive had failed, it was totally disassembled and trashed.
As for what happened with that drive, after several system crashes I looked into what was going on with it and found there were several hundred sectors that had gone bad and weren't able to be re-mapped. These bad sectors were smack bang in the middle of the swap partition, and within 2GB of the start of the drive. As the system occasionally used a large amount of swap, sometimes it would try reading/writing to one of these bad sectors and would result in a crash. Sometimes it was just the application that died, and sometimes it brought the system down.
Too bad. - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkpP9MYACgkQtTMYHG2NR9VC/wCfQssAO3I5YuNHmgtL39/DfjHJ b5oAn2odPBWeMf3Xw/Tu5+H6esxR012a =sVwG -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org