I don't see any one yet recommending the Drive Fitness Test, it works with many brands of drives, but I think is made by Hitachi. It is one of the options available on the Ultimate Boot CD ( www.ultimatebootcd.com), as well as elsewhere. On the UBCD it is very easy to use though and you don't have to mess with creating a boot floppy or some such. Plus there are many other good tools on there, including other drive diag tools, memory test, etc. I used it daily when I was working as a bench tech.
You will need to mount the drive as a secondary, it will not work in a USB caddy, none of the drive diags I know of work through USB. Just power down, open the machine, and connect the cables temporarily and lay the drive down in a convenient spot, run the tests, then power down and disconnect again. The DFT has a quick mode, and a long mode. Quick mode just does a few checks, long mode does a thorough media analysis. This is to check the physical drive and not the filesystem, which sounds like it is what you want. HTH ---------- Matt M. LinuxKnight On Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 3:19 PM, Mark Phillips <[email protected]>wrote: > I have an older hard drive (WD1200VE - 120 GB) that use to be in my laptop, > but I ran out of room so I replaced it with a larger drive. I have the > WD1200 in one of those nifty ez-upgrade USB drive enclosures and it mounts > and works just fine. I need some portable back up space, so I thought I > would use this drive. However, I would like to test it (thoroughly, > whatever > that means) to see if it has any problems before I use it as a backup > drive. > I am looking for either a command line tool or gui that I can run on a > Debian machine to exercise the drive and find any errors. An automated test > suite that I can setup and run in the background (ie does not suck up the > whole machine to run it) for a few hours/days to test the drive, log > errors, > fix those errors that can be fixed, etc. > > I can't use the WD diags for the drive since my Windows machine will not > recognize the drive in its usb caddy. I looked at bonnie++ and I can't find > a way to tell it to test a usb drive instead of the drive with the root > file > system. Bonnie is also a benchmarking program and not really a drive stress > test program. > > Any recommendations? I don't care about the data on the drive now, as I > have > sucked it all off to my new hard drive. > > Thanks! > > Mark > _______________________________________________ > PLUG mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
