Bootable Linux with HDD Diagnostic Utilities?
 

Hello All,

My sister is coming home from college for Valentine's Day. Her Compaq EVO n410c is having issues with the HDD or so her college's tech tells her. Her old one is a Compaq 25 GB 4200 RPM.

I bought her a new Seagate Momentus 100 GB 5400 RPM drive and would like to ensure that it is 100% functional as well as to ensure that her existing drive is flawed. I want to ensure that she goes back to school with a working system and not a troublesome one.

I did a quick search on the forum and didn't find anything that resembled my request. I hope such a distribution exists on an ISO or if anyone knows how to do this from an installed Linux environment that would be fine as well.

Additionally, I got her a Sandisk 4 GB USB Memory and would also like to ensure that is functional as well. But this is less an issue as I can fill it and do an md5sum.

Thanks in advance. She comes home Thursday and the drive will arrive tomorrow, I'd like to fully test it by tomorrow night as it should be here early in the morning.

Use badblocks
 

Read <http://www.cdr-pays-brest.infini.fr/index.php/Sauvegarde>

My French is too rusty, & PC's didn't exist when I studied it, so please give a link to something in English; after all, it is the official language of LQ.

The vendors site says the Compaq EVO n410c has a "30-GB User removable SMART hard drive" so load any GNU/Linux Live CD that has smartd on it and have it run some tests on the drive then fsck the whole thing. If there's any doubts after that you could run badblocks. But you can only test the new Seagate HW if you have a regular IDE to 2.5" IDE conversion cable (not expensive) or another laptop to test it in or you'll have to wait for the laptop to arrive. IIGC "sauvegarde" is about making backups.

I recommend this one two, it's a very good general purpose diagnostics CD.

It has tests for CPU, RAM, peripherals, benchmarks, system info, BIOS tools, HDD tools, partitioning tools, boot managers, file recovery and erasing utilities, NTFS, Network tools, anti-virus, DOS and Linux boot disks (including BasicLinux). It's a good thing to have around, I use it often for all sorts of diagnostics.

I'm going to record Ultimate Boot CD to disk. I have four other laptops in my room to test with, so it should be very easy. My 600E is compatible with that drive and is simple to install.