>> >> On Monday 04 May 2009 17:56:43 L. V. Lammert wrote: >> >> > What is the best way to do a surface analysis on a disk?
>> 2009/5/5 Tony Abernethy <t...@servacorp.com>: >> > There is, in the e2fsprogs package, something called badblocks. > On Thu, May 07, 2009 at 01:10:56AM +0200, ropers wrote: >> I also would recommend badblocks(8), but I would recommend >> badblocks -svn >> instead of badblocks -sw. >> >> badblocks -svn also (s)hows its progress as it goes along, but does a >> (v)erbose (n)on-destructive read/write test (as opposed to either the >> default read-only test or the destructive read/write test). You can >> check an entire device with badblocks, or a partition, or a file. The >> great thing about using badblocks to check a partition is that it's >> filesystem-agnostic. It will dutifully check every bit of its target >> partition regardless of what's actually on it. And if you give >> badblocks -svn an entire storage device to test, it will not even care >> about the actual partition scheme used. Because this read/write test >> can trigger the disk's own built-in bad sector relocation, this means >> you can even have a disk that you can't read the partition table from, >> and running badblocks -svn over it may at least temporarily fix >> things. And I've used badblocks -svn e.g. to check old Macintosh >> floppies. Who cares that OpenBSD doesn't know much about the >> filesystem on those? badblocks does the job anyway. >> Oh, and of course it would probably be prudent to do a backup before >> read/write tests, even though badblocks is well-established and (with >> -n) supposed to be non-destructive. Supposed to... ;-) I've never been >> disappointed but YMMV. 2009/5/7 Marco Peereboom <sl...@peereboom.us>: > You people crack me up. I have been trying to ignore this post for a > while but can't anymore. Garbage like badblock are from the era that > you still could low level format a drive. Remember those fun days? > When you were all excited about your 10MB hard disk? > > Use dd to read it; if it is somewhat broken the drive will reallocate > it. If it is badly broken the IO will fail and it is time to toss the > disk. Those are about all the flavors you have available. Running > vendor diags is basically a fancier dd. Why do you consider badblocks garbage? I remember now that we talked about this before over a year ago, when I first asked about using badblocks on OpenBSD. Back then I eventually surmised that using dd to do the same thing as badblocks -svn would be possible but a lot more cumbersome, cf.: http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/openbsd-misc/2008/4/19/1499524 Am I/was I mistaken, and if so, where? Thanks and regards, --ropers
