[plug] Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!

[Craig Foster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: plug-bounces at plug.linux.org.au 
> [mailto:plug-bounces at plug.linux.org.au] On Behalf Of Brad Campbell
> Sent: Saturday, 8 January 2005 12:49 PM
> To: plug at plug.linux.org.au
> Subject: [plug] Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!
> 
<snip> 
> While I'm here, does anyone know a sure fire way to kill a 
> hard disk that does not involve physical damage? I have a 
> Maxtor Maxline-II 250GB that is slowly growing bad sectors. I 
> can't use it in my RAID as I can't rely on the disk, but it 
> is not yet bad enough to RMA so I need to coax it to get 
> worse in a hurry to be able to RMA the disk. I figured I 
> might just leave my machine on doing constant badblock -n 
> cycles, which should just exercise it to death (that seems to 
> make the bad blocks grow faster anyway). I guess I could cook 
> it, but I just have a problem with doing it that way.
> 
> Frustrated in Dubai.
> Brad

I'll preface this method with a similar reason to you. The WD 20G drive was
faulty in Linux (read errors even in PIO mode) but fine in Windows (go
figure) - the supplier wouldn't accept it under warranty, so I bent the
rules...

Anyway, I ran a repeated 'cat /dev/random > /dev/hdd' to the drive and
trailed the cables to allow me to put the drive somewhere warm - on top of
my UPS. Waited a day with this running, until the badblocks started showing
in decent numbers. As the drive was still warm, I reran the drive test
floppy, and got the required errors.

Hope this helps,

CraigF.