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.

I'll second this.
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.