[ale] what exactly does a long smart hdd test do?

[Rich Faulkner]

I still use Spinrite as well but will be looking for a replacement soon.
Would pull the drive from the system; attach it to a test box that you
can run an extended recovery cycle on and use that bench to do your
drive conditioning/recovery.  If you do this, you may want to put a fan
on the bare drive as they do get hot running like this and if you're
working on a "dying" drive it is possible that an extended trip down
Spinrite lane may kill it sooner.  Good thing that hardware is cheap!

Otherwise why not go trolling through Google on the topic of SMART.
Wikipedia may have some gems as well...but if SMART is flagging a drive,
you may be best to ditch it.  

Again, hardware is cheap!

Cheers.........Rich


On Fri, 2012-05-11 at 01:41 -0400, Ron Frazier (ALE) wrote:

> Hi guys,
> 
> I'm running routine diagnostics on my hard drives. My normal practice
> is to run SpinRite on them, which reads each sector, then refreshes
> the magnetic fields by inverting and writing and inverting and writing
> them again (in the particular mode I'm using). Thus, every bit is
> tested both with a 0 and 1 and all the original data is refreshed. I
> don't want to get into a discussion as to the merits of this at the
> moment. I'm convinced it's a good idea. My problem is that I have one
> computer that's so old and the bios is so old and the hdd is so big,
> that SpinRite complains because the bios cannot access the whole
> drive. So, SpinRite won't run. Once Windows or Linux starts up, those
> systems can access the whole hdd. However, SpinRite runs strictly at
> the dos / bios level from a bootable CD.
> 
> At the very least, I want to do a surface analysis be reading each
> sector. That, at least, will let the hdd controller review each sector
> and determine if it thinks there are any problems. In Windows, I can
> start a chkdisk, either graphically or on the command line, and
> specify the surface analysis option, and it will accomplish my goal.
> 
> My problem is on the Linux side of the fence. I don't know how to do
> what I want there. I need to force the hdd to read all the sectors on
> the EXT4 main partition as well as the swap partition. Of course, I'm
> wanting to do all this nondestructively. So, I'm wondering exactly
> what a long smart test does, and whether it will accomplish my goal.
> It not, what would you recommend?
> 
> Thanks in advance.
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> Ron
> 
> 
> --
> 
> Sent from my Android Acer A500 tablet with bluetooth keyboard and K-9
> Mail.
> Please excuse my potential brevity.
> 
> (To whom it may concern. My email address has changed. Replying to
> former
> messages prior to 03/31/12 with my personal address will go to the
> wrong
> address. Please send all personal correspondence to the new address.)
> 
> (PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want
> to
> call on the phone. I get about 300 emails per day from alternate
> energy
> mailing lists and such. I don't always see new email messages very
> quickly.)
> 
> Ron Frazier
> 770-205-9422 (O) Leave a message.
> linuxdude AT techstarship.com
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20120511/22fd2e47/attachment.html