(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Hello,all.

I'm rebuilding a machine and I'd like to evaluate some disks I have. How can I tell if a used disk is worth re-installing?

I see the S.M.A.R.T. entry in the BIOS, but I'm unsure how it works, or if it's appropriate for this use.

Thanks in advance for any help.

musher0

"S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology; often written as SMART) is a monitoring system for computer hard disk drives to detect and report on various indicators of reliability, in the hope of anticipating failures."

Just turn it on and if there is problems, you will find out at boot.

I normally dl the manufacturer's diagnostic utility and boot from it to do a thorough test, this can take some time though. The Seagate one is good because it can test drives from a few other manufacturer's.

In my non commercial experience, actual hdd failures have been very rare in normal usage. I have most disk utilities I could obtain when they were available. I have never found anything that could predict disk life. grc markets a program they claim can do just that but it is fairly pricey. I don't have it. Most failures have been software related I have many hdd's, one 40 gb disk which appeared to have many bad sectors,most were near the center of the disk. I created a 10 gb partition at the beginning of the disk then a small linux swap partition then a 10 data partition at the end of the disk. It appears to work ok. I don't use it for anything I want to keep.
Cheers

smartmontools-5.39.1-i486.pet can be found at
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=51995

musher0,

I have been using Gsmartcontol in Wary Puppy. ttuuxxx made a Pet a few years ago and it seems to work fine in many different breeds. You can find more info here and/or download the necessary package(s).

Monsie

Thank you all for your insight and information !

musher0

I'm getting lots of freezes and an inability to shut down programs and/or Puppy itself due to input/output errors. Could a failing hard drive be the issue?

Do you hear a clicking sound when the drive is accessed?

Not that I'm aware of...

But I downloaded that monitoring program and it said that there were read errors.

Personally, I'd be out shopping for a new drive ASAP.

Read errors... are Not Good.

Thanks. Running off the old reliable CD player right now.

Ok, this is not written for Linux but it works with Linux partitions just fine. Its a stand along program (A CDROM with a freeware dos to boot it up) called SPINRITE You can find info on it at grc.com Its commercial (I have no connection with them) Its written by a guy who really knows Hard Disks at the low low level. Spinrite is used to recover data (Like sectors that don't read not crashed file structure) but one of its greatest uses is to test your drive and see how many soft errors its had and when that number starts to go up? Time to upgrade to a new drive. If you have an aging drive that you need to get data off really bad there is nothing out there that touches this program.

It does things like seek onto the track from different locations to try to get that "last good read" I guess I could babble on and on but I've used this thing since the early days of the IBM PC and its rarely "updated" because its done "rite" (correctly) ha!

Hello,
Hirens boot cd has more tools, specific to brand/type, than you could ever need. HDD tools, MBR tools, Motherboard tools. Memory tools.
Too much to list....