[mythtv-users] Need help - partitioning foobar

[Per Jessen]

Simon Hobson wrote:

> Craig Huff wrote:
>>Guess the new drive may have a problem.  Off to research ways to test
>>it.  Probably something useful on UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD).
> 
> smartctl should be on any respectable "live CD".
> 
> smartctl -a will show you all the status about the drive
> 
> smartctl -t [ long | short ] will start a long or short self test
> (IIRC the syntax correctly)
> 
> At work when I've got a pile of disks to check, I'll use smartctl
> first (though it doesn't always owrk on older drives), then I'll write
> zeros to the whole drive (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx bs=1024k), and
> then I'll read the entire drive (dd if=/dev/sdx of=/dev/null
> bs=1024k). After this (assuming it all passes) I can be reasonably
> confident that a) the drive is OK, and b) I've wiped it well enough
> for it to go back into use without worrying about what was on it. You
> may say it's not worth it given the cost of drives these days and the
> value of my time, but for some of the older drives it really is - have
> you seen the price of (say) SCA SCSI drives these days (if you can
> find them)

Yup, I've seen the prices - I'm very much into buying second hand SCA
drives. Just picked up a bunch of 2.5" today in fact. 

Wrt testing drives (we're surely way off-topic by now?), I prefer to
also run a multi-threaded read/write stress tests for 24 hours or so. 
It will pick out those just _slightly_ flaky drives.  



-- 
Per Jessen, Zürich (9.6°C)
http://www.dns24.ch/ - free DNS hosting, made in Switzerland.