check the health of a drive?

genmaicha · 08-28-2009, 03:58 PM

What commands can I use to assess the health of a drive? I'd like to make use of some of the ancient ide drives at work but have no idea which ones are safe to use. I know about badblocks, but what else is there?

frankbell · 08-28-2009, 05:31 PM

There's probably something better, but here's for starts:

cfdisk or fdisk to partition them. Cfdisk is slightly easier to use because it's sort of graphical. Not in the GUI sense, but, when you fire it up, it lists the drives and lets you select the one you want to work on with the arrow keys, as well as to select the action you want to take with the arrow keys.

mkfs to apply a file system.

fsck to check the file system.

fordeck · 08-28-2009, 05:53 PM

You might also check out smartctl

Regards,

Fordeck

RaptorX · 08-28-2009, 05:57 PM

smartctl is a good option if those drives have S.M.A.R.T capabilities in any other case I guess fsck will do. If you have an ntfs partition you would have to check it from a windows machine with chkdsk since the fsck.ntfs is not ready yet...