anybody knows a command line prog for hard disk checks in linux?
it would be necessary if the prog only checks if it can read from every sector

i just need a simple and fast and more or less good tool to know if my HD is damaged

thx@ll

goto the website of the hard disk Mfg........maxtor, IBM sites do offer HD tools you can download to do checkups of disks....these tools can/do fit on a floppy or you can burn to a cd-r ........

Do this:

(1) Using an external USB or FireWire type drive, make an immediate backup copy of everything most-critical to you. rsync is very good for this. (Mind you, I'm not saying this because the disk test will put things in danger, but because you may not have done this in a long while...)

(2) Boot the computer from a LiveCD. You need to test a hard-disk while it is un-mounted.

(3) Disk-checking tools like e2fsck have a -c option which will cause the badblocks program to be run, and which will incorporate that information into the filesystem, i.e. by marking the bad sectors so they won't be used.

(4) Something very powerful that I only found about myself very recently .. thanks to this very forum .. is smartctl. It turns out that most IDE drives have on-board diagnostics which can be run. The smartd daemon can even run them periodically and e-mail you when there are problems. (You learn something new every day...)

@sundialsvcs
smartctl seems a good idea
i'll have a look

@320mb
thx

Smartctl and badblocks are the two best tools out there to test harddisks under linux.

fsck -c will do a block check of a partition.