[nycbug-talk] how to test dying disks?

[Dave Steinberg]

> I've got a new one for myself here, and am shouting out for a url or 
> somesuch to point me in the right direction.  It's low priority here, 
> this is for personal fun...
>
> I've got a fistfull of failing drives here.  I'm not sure exactly how 
> to properly diagnose the broken drives, and don't want to trash the 
> ones which are still funcitoning- but I'm even having problems booting 
> with the drives plugged in (disk geometry crapola).
>
> Does anyone know any good shell utilities to diagnose and help me sort 
> out which drives are good and bad, any BSD os?  Looking for something 
> which justifies the time spent doing this over just purchasing some 
> new drives...
>
> Perhaps tools I can use after booting from CD?  (btw, I'm stumped as 
> I've grown up in the Mac world of drive repair, always simple and 
> intuitive gui tools for this kind of thing when I need it...)

Atactl can provide details on SMART values if your drives support it.  
Then again, I've never really come across anything too interesting from 
SMART diagnostics, but maybe I just haven't seen the right disks.  It 
always felt like black magic to me, so I dunno.  :-)

Regards,
-- 
Dave Steinberg
http://www.geekisp.com/