[mythtv-users] Need help - partitioning foobar

[Simon Hobson]

Craig Huff wrote:
>Guess the new drive may have a problem.  Off to research ways to test
>it.  Probably something useful on UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD).

smartctl should be on any respectable "live CD".

smartctl -a will show you all the status about the drive

smartctl -t [ long | short ] will start a long or short self test (IIRC the syntax correctly)

At work when I've got a pile of disks to check, I'll use smartctl first (though it doesn't always owrk on older drives), then I'll write zeros to the whole drive (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx bs=1024k), and then I'll read the entire drive (dd if=/dev/sdx of=/dev/null bs=1024k). After this (assuming it all passes) I can be reasonably confident that a) the drive is OK, and b) I've wiped it well enough for it to go back into use without worrying about what was on it. You may say it's not worth it given the cost of drives these days and the value of my time, but for some of the older drives it really is - have you seen the price of (say) SCA SCSI drives these days (if you can find them) ?