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Re: [PLUG] Has my disk gone bad?
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On Sun, Nov 19, 2000 at 10:22:28PM -0500, edgee@goppelt.net wrote:
> Thanks for the tip. Can you recommend any disk diagnostic software for linux,
> something that would really exercise the drive and (hopefully) cause a marginal
> drive to fail?
Glad I could help. While I don't know of any utilities designed
specifically for disk diagnostics, a search of freshmeat might turn up
something. As far as simply stressing the disk, you might try the wipe(1)
utility. It's not what it's designed for, but it should work nicely. A
week or two ago, I had several concurrent wipe processes going on a
machine, and it drove the load up to 11.50 at one point, and the drive
light stayed on nearly steadily. For around 15 hours, IIRC. At which
point I killed them. :)
wipe is designed as a secure file deletion mechanism, making 34 passes
thorough the file, 4 of which overwrite it with random data and 30 of which
overwrite it with specific patterns recommended for making data hard to
recover by any means. (Note that it's generally considered that data can
be recovered with enough time and money if it's been overwritten up to 7
times.) The part that will really stress the machine are the system calls
to sync() after each pass, which causes the OS to flush its disk I/O
buffers and actually write them out. So what you would want to do is make
a few several-hundred megabyte files and then wipe them concurrently. Use
a command such as:
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=tempfile bs=1M count=200
to get your files, and then wipe the files simultaneously from different
login sessions. Should keep your disks beating for hours. :)
If you use Debian, then simply 'apt-get install wipe'. If you use a
different distribution, then try rpmfind or freshmeat. If you're still
coming up short, give Google's Linux-specific search at
<http://www.google.com/linux>.
--
Bill Jonas | "If you haven't gotten where you're going,
bill@billjonas.com | you aren't there yet." --George Carlin
http://www.billjonas.com/ | http://www.harrybrowne.org/
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