[plug] Stressing a disk

[Anthony J. Breeds-Taurima]

On Thu, 9 Jan 2003, Derek Fountain wrote:

> Is there a way to stress test a disk? I've got one which is behaving a bit 
> strangely. No bad sectors reported, but reiserfs gags when it's used as part 
> of a logical volume, and over night it appears to have lost it's partition 
> table.
> 
> I feel it deserves a 24 hour workout before I chuck it away. Any utils to do 
> that sort of thing?

Make two partitions of the same size and do:

while true ; do
	dd if=/dev/hdN1 of=/dev/hdN2
	dd if=/dev/hdN2 of=/dev/hdN1
	md5sum /dev/hdN[12]
done

where N is the approriate letter.  I have no idea how stressfull that is on a
disk?  It looks bad tho.


Yours Tony

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