[LBo] hard drive failure?

[Brice Hunt]

Jackson Robertson wrote:
> So lately I've been having a bunch of hard freezes with my system
> (computer
> totally freezes up, no mouse, no keyboard, have to press the power
> button on
> the tower to restart). I tried a new more powerful power supply but
> the same
> thing. I tried my older graphics card (which still works fine) but same
> thing. I was backing up some data (moving it to another harddrive) and I
> kept getting random input/output errors, random in the sense that it
> wasn't
> always with the same files, sometimes I would get these errors other
> times I
> would get no errors or errors with different files. These errors would
> also
> cause my system to freeze up a bit because I would get uninterruptible
> processes. So now I'm guessing that my harddrives are f*cked. How do I
> check
> my harddrives for failure? Are there tools out there that will check
> things
> out and let me know whats up? Thanks for any help.
>
> Jackson
If your hard drive supports S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and
Reporting Technology), you can use the smartmontools package to do
comprehensive tests on your drive and give you some good information
about any problems the drive is having.  You can also umount the
drive/partition having the problems and use the badblocks program to
check for bad blocks on the disk.  To check the file system on the disk,
use fsck.  Make sure you _carefully_ read the man pages for these
programs, as some options for these programs can destroy data.

Brice