[plug] Stressing a disk

[Harry McNally]

On Thu, 9 Jan 2003 15:27:45 +0000 Derek Fountain <derekfountain at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> > 1 - Check your BIOS settings - ie: - 'write behind' cacheing.
> >
> > 2 - Check with HDD manufacturer to see if there is a firmware revision
> > available for your HDD, if so apply it.
> >
> > 3 - Use manufacturer disk tools to analyse drive - possible that track 0 is
> > bad - may be able to recover with 'low-level' format - watch out for 'BAD
> > sectors' - and take care to move or backup all data from drive.
> 
> Heh, it's not worth it. It's a 1996 vintage, 2.5GB IDE drive. I've chucked it. 
> Thanks for the tips though...

Please don't chuck out hard disks. They are the most precious commodity
at Computer Angels. We are resorting to putting two 500MB drives in systems
to get them built. We need a minimum of 850MB in a single drive for our
installation.

If you think a drive is sus, put as much information as you can on a label.
The word 'sus' or 'faulty' lacks a certain helpfulness :)

We can look at it to see if it is useful. If you can't deliver drives out
to us in Belmont then bring them to a PLUG meeting and let me know you are
going so I can fetch them from you. 

We also dd the drives to wipe the media bit I'd suspect anyone on this
list would do that to a drive anyway if they felt the data needed to be
deleted. We dd regardless. 

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX

where X is the drive to wipe. Putting the target drive (on it's own)
in a scratch system and booting from floppy avoids accidental dimness.

or if you're feeling paranoid you could use

while true ; do
	dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX
	dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hdX
done

and run till paranoia is satisfied (or till you're sick of it) :)

cu
Harry

-- 
linux.conf.au 2003		The Australian Linux Technical Conference
http://linux.conf.au/		22-25 January 2003 in Perth, Western Australia

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