hdparm has now been updated to version 8.1, and includes some significant new features of potential interest to Linux kernel storage hackers: The new --make-bad-sector flag can be used to deliberately corrupt a sector on the media (creating a media error situation). This can be very handy for testing error recovery strategies and timeouts for devices and RAIDs. It uses the new ATA WRITE_UNC_EXT command (designed for the purpose) when the drive supports it, otherwise it will try and fall back on the older WRITE_LONG command (which is limited to LBA28). The manpage has more information on this option. There is also a new --write-sector (aka. --repair-sector) flag to *fix* a bad sector. This can be used later to undo the bad sectors created by the --make-bad-sector flag. The new --read-sector flag can be used to test a sector for media errors. I generally use the following sequence here: hdparm --make-bad-sector nnnnnnnn /dev/sdb ## corrup a sector hdparm --read-sector nnnnnnnn /dev/sdb ## verify that it is now bad test my device driver etc.. hdparm --repair-sector nnnnnnn /dev/sdb ## fix the bad sector hdparm --read-sector nnnnnnn /dev/sdb ## verify that it is now fixed hdparm also now has a new -N flag for dealing with Host-Protected-Areas (HPA), and other, more minor, fixes and enhancements. hdparm-8.1 is available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/hdparm/ Thanks to Bruce Allen for supplying me with test drives which implement the new WRITE_UNC_EXT command. Cheers Mark Lord - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
