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

[Ron Frazier (ALE)]

Hi Rich,

Thanks for the note. As far as I know, the drive is in good shape and working OK. I'm just running routine preemptive maintenance to hopefully keep it that way. If it starts throwing errors or something, I may put it in another machine for testing, replace it, or I might just decommission this machine. You're right that any exhaustive diagnostic, like SpinRite, can push a dying drive over the edge. SpinRite will warn you if the SMART system thinks the drive is about to die. Of course, if you couldn't read the drive anyway, you have nothing to lose. I've heard many testimonials on the podcast where SpinRite recovered the drive just enough to get data off before it died. I had a similar experience to that myself a few years ago.

I actually looked on Google for about 1/2 hour last night trying to figure out what a long SMART test does. I never could find the data.

Sincerely,

Ron


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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
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Ron Frazier
770-205-9422 (O) Leave a message.
linuxdude AT techstarship.com


Rich Faulkner <rfaulkner at tux86.org> wrote:

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 


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