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

Fri May 11 11:10:05 EDT 2012

I don't know what it *does*, but I know that it *means. *The drive will be
dead eventually. When? Who knows.

On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 10:44 AM, Ron Frazier (ALE) <
atllinuxenthinfo at techstarship.com> wrote:

> **
> 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
>
>
> --
>
> 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
>
>
> 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
>>
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>>
>>
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