Planetarion Forums

wu_trax · 30 Dec 2003, 18:15

ok, once again one of my hard disks seems to be broken. the hard disk is installed on a linux system and now im wondering what program i can use to check the hard disk.
can anyone help? i really dont have much of an idea about linux

edit: ok, i found something called badblocks.

GReaper · 30 Dec 2003, 18:45

e2fsck?

wu_trax · 30 Dec 2003, 18:53

yes, but how do i unmount /home while the system is running

?

GReaper · 30 Dec 2003, 23:29

Quote:

Originally Posted by wu_trax

yes, but how do i unmount /home while the system is running

?

Use a boot disk/cd instead. Don't fsck a mounted filesystem.

Mit · 30 Dec 2003, 23:44

if its like my distro, login at the console as root (/root is the home and not /home/root) and then u can unmount the drive and run e2fsck

GReaper · 31 Dec 2003, 00:25

Ooops, forgot about it only being /home :P

wu_trax · 31 Dec 2003, 01:30

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mit

if its like my distro, login at the console as root (/root is the home and not /home/root) and then u can unmount the drive and run e2fsck

mine cant do that (it says "device is busy")
but now i rebooted and everything seems to be fine. ill try the boot-cd tomorrow though, id rather be sure. i dont want to lose any data.

wu_trax · 31 Dec 2003, 13:01

oh great, now its completly broken

it started making strange clicking noices all the time.
i tryed to that e2fsck, but it told me that it cant read the superblock.
damnit, i should start making backups of EVERYTHING

meglamaniac · 1 Jan 2004, 18:32

It's been a while since I had to do anything like this under linux, but afaik there is a way (on an EXT3 filesystem) to set the "dirty" flag for a partition, which then forces it to be treated as if the system had gone through an unexpected reset next time you boot the machine. This has the advantage of running a completely automated file integrety check without you having to mess about unmounting things because it's done at boot.
Of course this doesn't physically inspect blocks on the drive, but it will verify your data for you.

To be honest though, it sounds more like your drive is physically buggered rather than just having a few spiked blocks if it's making that sort of noise. Things that indicate impending drvie doom are:

* Loud clicks at irregular intervals (this is the noise from the drive forcing a drivehead reset to protect itself from a head crash)
* Unexpected spindown-spinup sequences (can also be caused by the drivehead reset)
* Quieter clicks during normal use (can indicate mechanical problems with the spool arms and/or the motors that operate them)
* Increased noise from the normal spin of the drive (can indicate mechanical problems with the main drive motor and/or the platters themselves)

I'm sure there are other symptoms, but those are some to be looking out for. If your drive is doing any of these you should be either on your way to buy another drive to image it onto, or backing it up onto DVD or one of them fancy multi-GB tape spooler jobbies.

wu_trax · 1 Jan 2004, 18:42

yes, its physically broken. i have to return it

i did a low-level format and various checks during the last night and and there were quite a lot fo bad sectors. but at least i managed to mount the hd a last time (manually, when mounted on boot my linux went into some protection mode and i couldnt do much) and copy most of the data on the drive.
does it cause damage if you run an udma-133-hd at a much lower speed? (it was on the same controller as my dvd-rom)

meglamaniac · 1 Jan 2004, 22:47

No there is no reason it should cause damage, exactly as running a 2Ghz chip at 1.5Ghz isn't going to do anything.

Incidentally, unless you're using quite an old board (like 4 years or so) drives on the same channel can operate at different speeds (eg. one of my harddrives is at UDMA mode 5 while a DVD-ROM on the same channel operates at UDMA mode 3).