Is this hard drive dying?
Hi friends:
I have a Maxtor 20.5 GB IDE hard drive, and I had trouble formatting it in Windows. The formatting would just stop at a certain point, and never start up again. So it was suggested to me that in order to test the drive, I boot from a Linux CD and try running: "mke2fs -c -c /dev/sda" to perform a read/write test on the largest partition (18 GB). I did this using a Knoppix CD, and got the following output: mke2fs 1.36 Filesystem label= OS type: Linux Block size=4096 (log=2) Fragment size=4096 (log=2) 2305632 inodes, 4600639 blocks 230431 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the superuser First data block=0 141 block groups 32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group 16352 inodes per group superblock backups stored on blocks: 32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208 4096000 Testing with pattern 0xaa: done 639 Reading and comparing: done 639 Testing with pattern 0x55: done 639 Reading and comparing: done 639 Testing with pattern 0xff: done 639 Reading and comparing: done 639 Testing with pattern 0x00: done 639 Reading and comparing: done 639 writing inode tables: done Writing superblocks and filesystems accounting information: done This filesystem will be automatically checked every 37 mounts or 100 days,, whichever comes first. Use tune2fs -c or -i to override. Can someone tell me what the numbers mean? Is this the number of blocks the formatting tool thinks may be bad, or had trouble with? I really need to know if this drive is going to HD heaven. Thanks for any help. newmoon |
It all looks fine, I don't see any error messages...
What line were you particulairy concerned about? |
It means Linux successfully wrote to the drive, and sees it as a viable drive. It doesn't really tell you anything fancy about the drive.
If you really wnt to test it, you should use something like OnTrack which is a HD testing program. It isn't perfect, but will give you lots better info that just knowing you can boot/install and read/write on an HD. Otherwise Maxtor has a booot disc tool you can use to check their hard drives available on their website. |
Thanks guys.
Well, I guess I was worried about all the 639s there. What do they indicate? When I looked at some other people's posting of similar output, they had just "done" where I have "639". Can anyone tell me what those numbers mean? Thanks again for your help. I hope the drive will survive. newmoon |
You can use the fsck tool to check the partition for bad blocks. IIRC, the syntax is
fsck -c -c -C 0 /dev/sda The two -c makes fsck call the badblocks tool, and -C 0 tells it to use a progress bar. I hope this helps. |
Quote:
The manufacturer's utility will check for failing electronics and bad blocks. If the drive fails the check you want to back up you data ASAP and not fool around with losing it. |
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