[lug] RE: Diagnostics-Linux had drive utitiity to test for bad sectors or blocks. (fwd)

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Tue, Nov 27, 2001 at 09:54:08AM -0700, J. Wayde Allen wrote:
>    Does anyone know where I could get a Red Hat Linux compatible 
>diagnostics program to test for bad sectors or blocks and recover data 

There's a program called "badblocks", which can do a read-only or a
read/write test of a partition or the whole drive.  I usually run it in
read/write mode on new drives, but that wipes the data from the drive.  If
you run in read-only mode, it'll check every block, but it's not as
thorough.

I believe that IBM has a tool to do this sort of diagnostic as well, and it
runs from it's own bootable floppy, IIRC.  I thought I had bookmarked it,
but can't seem to find it now.  I think they call it "Drive Fitness" or
something.

Sean
-- 
 "You can tune a file-system, but you can't tune a fish."
                 --  Quote from tunefs(1M) man page
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com - Linux Consulting since 1995. Qmail, KRUD, Firewalls, Python