On Tue, Oct 02, 2012 at 00:21:26AM +0000, Jason White wrote: > >hdparm might not be installed, whereas dmesg will always be installed. > I use smartmontools to check hard drives. More specifically, I run the daemon > so that any detected failures will be reported, and I can also use smartctl to > obtain reports from individual drives. smartmon/smartctl are also wonderful tools. They are, however, also not installed by default on some popular distros. And, since they use a database of hard drives, newer drives are often missing, and so only raw data is presented; there is a bit of confusion reported as to what some of the smartctl-reported data values mean (e.g. sometimes the higher the better, but sometimes the lower the better). > The Serial Attached SCSI drives on my workstation are behind a controller that > makes them appear as a single drive. Most specialized drive controllers are proprietary to the extent that Linux will just reflect however the controller has been instructed to show, and the "true" configuration is hidden from Linux. Again, to focus on the OP's problem (laptop, 60GB probably-IDE dual-boot drive, with some unknown although hopefully small number of bad spots developed), my suggestions are aimed at scraping whatever data is possible from the failing drive, as quickly as possible, because once a drive begins to exhibit such behavior, the OP is likely to be living on borrowed time at that point. > However, it's possible to load the sg > kernel module (e.g., in /etc/modules or manually with modprobe) My experience with sg/sgmod is with SCSI tape backup systems. This is an area where Linux seems relatively primitive. It does work, mostly, but there is lots of voodoo in terms of timing and waiting long enough for asynchronous "stuff" to finish... By the way, anyone using SCSI ought to have the "sg3-utils" package installed -- that's a pretty complete swiss-army knife toolset. > Fortunately I don't have to deal with Microsoft Windows at all, on any of my > machines, so I haven't had any experience of installing or copying it. Lucky you. -- Henry Yen Aegis Information Systems, Inc. Senior Systems Programmer Hicksville, New York _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list