Software to scan my hdd

[SoulSe]

I have an oldish hard drive which I am afraid might have bad sectors. I can not find disk scanning software for Linux! What the hell, it should be one of the first tools included with any OS, or is it just me?

[tyme]

normally the vendor of the hard drive supplies a program to do this, in the form of a boot disk. personally, i rarely use any other tools. mainly because, in my mind, the vendor would know their disks better than others, and so should be better at scanning and checking them.

 

now, the real problem is, most of these boot disks are made to be created in windows :-/

[SoulSe]

I have bought around 28 hard drives in my life and not a single one has come with software. This includes Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital, Fujitsu mainly, and some others.

 

In Windows I would simply use scandisk, which came with windoze. Norton also had disk doctor and there were some other apps.

 

I cannot believe that no one has ever done this for Linux!!! What the hell, do we just sit around and hope that our drives are ok?

[JediSB]

All of those manufacturers make diagnostic software for their drives. More than likely you've purchased a whitebox/OEM/bare drive that doesn't come with these disks. However, if you buy a drive in a retail box it should come with a disk. You can download these tools here:

 

Maxtor/Quantum - PowerMax utility

Seagate - Seatools utility

Western Digital - Data Lifeguard Tools

Fujistu - Diagnostic tool

 

I've used the Maxtor tool myself when Windows XP's CHKDISK kept finding tons of errors on my HD for no apparent reason. The tool let me run several low-level tests to check the integrity of the drive. It was fine so the problem is coming from XP. I just haven't pinpointed it yet. I ended up using the MAxtor disk to do a low level reformat of the drive and reinstalled everything. I'm still getting the problems with XP. (Which is why I'm D/Ling Mandrake 9.1 BTW.)

[Guest anon]

Might help http://docs.rinet.ru:8083/RedHatu/rhl05.htm#E68E31

[tyme]

I have bought around 28 hard drives in my life and not a single one has come with software. This includes Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital, Fujitsu mainly, and some others.

 

I never said it came with the HD :wink: i meant to say you could download it from their website, but apparently i forgot to mention that.

[SoulSe]

This is all fantastic, but still no software for Linux. Perhaps this is something that I shouldn't be worrying about, as suggested in that article, anon.

 

I dunno, I just remember trashing drives in the old days that became riddled with bad sectors. These days, drive manufacturing has come along way, but it still happens.

[Cannonfodder]

I think you are confusing the file system with the hard drive. Hard drive access is done by low level code and the vendor is best at it.

 

However, I wouldn't mind having some software for accessing low level sectors and viewing it in text format like I could with norton and so far I haven't found it (haven't looked too hard either). I would like to be able to look at the partition table in hex format.

 

Personally, I think linux tends to separate their file systems from the actual hard drive compared to windows which pretty much has 2 types of file systems (NTFS, FAT??)