how to verify installation?

[Bart Silverstrim]

Karl Larsen wrote:
> Robert Holtzman wrote:
>> On Thu, 21 Aug 2008, Karl Larsen wrote:
>>
>>   
>>> Randall J. Parr wrote:
>>>     
>>>> I have a Ubuntu hardy system which appears to have developed some bad
>>>> blocks and/or file corruption on an SATA drive.
>>>>
>>>>       
>>>    You have a SATA Hard Drive that is bad.
>>>     
>> Why?
>>
>>   
>     I have never lost a single file or had bad blocks on any of my hard 
> drives. Your going to say it could be that  the file system is just 
> bad.  I use ext3 and have never had a bad block ever.
> 
>      This guy wants to find out how many files are lost. One file is 
> enough for me to declare a hard drive bad.

I havne't followed this one but from this message, if you're in the 
"playing it safe" school, Karl may have a point BUT it  is possible that 
something else happened.

I would strongly suggest you check out your drive's SMART status. See if 
you can use the SMART tools for linux to see if there's an alarm for the 
drive in its' logs.

If you have more than a "couple" bad blocks, you do have a good chance 
that you're going to suffer a drive failure. Get another drive, make a 
good backup. Once you're losing files and you can't tie it to a 
particular event like a power failure, I don't trust drives like that 
anymore. If you want to try to continue using it I would get a USB 
enclosure and another drive and stick it into that enclosure to use as a 
portable drive, install a new drive into the machine, and reformat your 
old one and see what it does.