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