Checking a hard drive for blocking a boot procedure

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

Today I observed that a boot attempt succeeded after I unplugged a SATA cable for one hard drive. (The detection of SATA devices failed somehow by an AMI BIOS when all hard drives were connected.)

  • Now I am curious if I should check this questionable storage device further with additional system tools.
  • Will a system diagnosis show that the time has come for a replacement?
#2

Well smartctl will show you drive health (man smartctl for options)

But a system should not boot if a partition is missing unless you have used nofail or other parameters in the /etc/fstab file. Worth a look I guess.