Hello All,

Is there a way to do low-level hard disk test based on linux?

I mean, no matter what the filesystem is, the test can do something like, scan all the sectors, write/read data to/from hard disk..etc.

Thank you in advance for your response!

try fsck (man fsck and check if that's what you need)

If you are wanting to check to see if the drive itself is still good the utility available from the manufacturer is a good choice.
The Ultimate boot CD has most of them.
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

Try the badblocks command. There is a man page for it. By default id does a non distructive read only test.

Just to expand on what 2damncommon said:

There is a S.M.A.R.T. utility that is native to Linux and should in theory work on any chipset/HDD combination which purport to support SMART. To use it you need to start the smartd daemon, and smartctl is the test utility you use to interact with the SMART tests built into the hard drive(s).

For DETAILED info on SMART:
man smartd
man smartctl

Many thanks to all you guys.

Your information is quite helpful to me.

However, where can I find source codes for the low-level hard disk test?
Since I would like to learn more about how the test is achieved.

Thanks again to you guys!

Well to be honest, it's the hard drives' firmware that is actually conducting the low-level test, and that information is usually proprietary. It is unlikely you will receive the source code for those tests as all the S.M.A.R.T. utilities do is request via the SMART protocol that the drives run their internal tests. To get access to the source you'd need to work for a data recovery company which has reverse-engineered the firmware or has a partnership with the manufacturers, actually work for one of the manufacturers, or reverse engineer the drives' firmware yourself from the machine language code in the chips.

It's unlikely that you would actually be able to write a portable HDD low-level testing utility without using SMART since sector addresses are abstracted and not revealed to programmers interacting with the drives anyhow; the drives' firmware actually handles the internal addressing. Any CHS specs you might see are works of fiction which only work out mathematically to a size which the drive's firmware will agree with. Why would you need that info anyhow, considering that SMART will do most if not all of what you would need?