Best practices for troubleshooting a failing HDD

[Andrew Farris]

On Tue, 2009-12-01 at 22:23 -0800, Jonathan D. Armendariz wrote:
> Good evening everyone (here anyway),
> 
> Perhaps this may be a more generic Linux question than anything but 
> since I'm here ... here goes.
> 
> As we all know most HDD manufacturers offer support for Windows and to a 
> slightly lesser extent Mac OS but for Linux (including *buntu) not so 
> much. Further to this if a HDD is suspected of failing (USB or FW 
> connected) for Windows one can check the Disk Management console and 
> Device Manager and for Mac one can check the System Profiler as well as 
> the Disk Utility. The question I ask of you, in the collective sense, is 
> what tricks or best practices might you employ for a Linux (*buntu) 
> user? Obviously a command line inquiry would be ideal given that not 
> everyone uses the same distro or WM or whatever the case may be. Any 
> general guideline or point in the right direction would be most appreciated!

For internal drives, the best practice is usually to go to the
manufacturer's website and download their specific bootable disk
test-tool for verifying weather a hard-drive is good or not.

Since you've mentioned USB/FW, I assume you're talking about external
drives... in that case I don't know if the above method would work. 

I know Ubuntu is now including the nice "palimpsest" GUI tool which can
give you information on the health of the drive, but that doesn't help
you in the case of cross-Distro/WM/DM dept...

One trick i remember from someplace is to use dd to make a copy of the
disk partitions, but just pipe the output to /dev/null...then watch for
errors. I don't remember if there's more to it than that, so you may
want to read up on the concepts.

Other than that though, I can't really think of anything... hope that
helps though.

-- 
Andrew
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