Check IDE Disk Wellness
 

Other than forcing an fsck on reboot, is there a way to check the health of an IDE drive on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES system?

Linux xxxxxx 2.4.21-58.ELsmp #1
SMP Tue Nov 4 11:47:13
EST 2008 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

smartctl? Isn't that what it's designed for?

You can use smartctl to verify HD health status by S.M.A.R.T. capabilities of the disk itself.

hdparm is a command that compiles easily on tiny Puppy Linux >
Source:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/hdparm/files/hdparm/

hdparm -iI /dev/hda#

should give some first info about the IDE HDD

It also works with SATA drives

The man page is very large . Just to update it , i would compile and install a newer hdparm source .

My hdparm is 9.15 so i will do this now ...

It's simply make && make install inside the source ,
default installs to /sbin and /usr/share/man/man8

bash-3.00# hdparm -V
hdparm v9.39
bash-3.00# hdparm -H /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
drive temperature (celsius) is: 38
drive temperature in range: yes

My HDD is a used Hitachi one ;)

Now to unlock my crashed Laptop Vista HDD :banghead:

Depending on the drive...

In addition to the SMART utility, there might be a HDD utility from the drive manufacturer you can download and run. Samsung has ESTool, Seagate has SeaTools; other brands have their own.

For SMART to work it must be activated in the system BIOS and in the HDD firmware. That SMART is activated on the HDD is one of the things a HDD utility will confirm, or will activate if necessary.