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

[Ron Frazier (ALE)]

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


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Ron Frazier
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linuxdude AT techstarship.com
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