[CentOS] HD Failures

Mon Mar 3 15:46:56 UTC 2008
Matty <matty91 at gmail.com>

On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 3:13 AM, Jed Reynolds <lists at bitratchet.com> wrote:
> Jimmy Bradley wrote:
>  >       I'm just curious if any one else has noticed this. I've bought
>  > hard drives from both Walmart and Best Buy. If I can wait, I order them
>  > from newegg.com. I'm beginning to think that the staff at both Walmart
>  > and Best Buy, somewhere along the supply line must dribble the drives
>  > like basket balls. The reason I say that is all the drives I have bought
>  > from those two places fail within a few months time. Has anyone else
>  > noticed that? Just curious
>
>  You might want to consider them as possibly recycled drives. If you
>  don't have a copy of SpinRite you can force the drive to check all the
>  sectors with fdisk ...
>
>  fdisk -f -y -c -c

Which fdisk utility are you using? According to the man pages and the
online help, the fdisk / sfdisk utilities that ship with CentOS don't
appear to have a "-c" option.


>  or if you are formatting,
>
>  mkfs.ext3 -c -c

You can also use the badblocks(8) utility to check for bad sectors.


>  will also do this check.
>
>  This will byte-swap check and should force updates of SMART statistics
>  and  bad-sector detection on the drive.

You can also run an extended SMART self-test to verify the drive integrity.

- Ryan
-- 
UNIX Administrator
http://prefetch.net