CHKDSK for Linux

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1

Further to a recent catestrophic failure of a LVM in my server I am in a
position where I have several hard-drives which I am rebuilding my
environment on.

It would seem that there is an error on one of them (8 disks in total)
but I don’t know which!

Before I re-build and put data onto a potential bad disk, is there a
tool / utility that I can use to check the disk before hand?

–
badger_fruit

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2

fsck.ext3
reiserfsck (if using ReiserFS)
xfs_check and xfs_repair (for XFS)

–
‘Get h264enc’ (http://h264enc.sourceforge.net) - ‘Get xvidenc’
(http://xvidenc.sourceforge.net) - ‘Get divxenc’
(http://divxenc.sourceforge.net)

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3

if you also want to check the disk itself, use badblocks

–
‘Get h264enc’ (http://h264enc.sourceforge.net) - ‘Get xvidenc’
(http://xvidenc.sourceforge.net) - ‘Get divxenc’
(http://divxenc.sourceforge.net)

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4

badger fruit wrote:

>
> Further to a recent catestrophic failure of a LVM in my server I am in a
> position where I have several hard-drives which I am rebuilding my
> environment on.
>
> It would seem that there is an error on one of them (8 disks in total)
> but I don’t know which!
>
> Before I re-build and put data onto a potential bad disk, is there a
> tool / utility that I can use to check the disk before hand?
>
>

fsck etc only work on file systems - to do a hardware check you’ll probably
need specialist software supplied by the HDD manufacturer

Check out Ultimate Boot CD http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

Alan

–
email =~ s/nospam/fudokai/

5

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If you’re using a server-class system, especially w/hardware RAID, this
should be fairly standard stuff. For anything else having a filesystem
check will probably do a decent job of finding failures that are
consistent or easy to reproduce. If the disk is really going bad I
would expect either to find a problem. Depending on how bad it is you
may get errors just trying to overwrite the entire disk with some
utility made to do as much, from “Dan’s Boot and Nuke” (DBAN) down to
something simple like ‘dd’.

Good luck.

ajp wrote:
> badger fruit wrote:
>
>> Further to a recent catestrophic failure of a LVM in my server I am in a
>> position where I have several hard-drives which I am rebuilding my
>> environment on.
>>
>> It would seem that there is an error on one of them (8 disks in total)
>> but I don’t know which!
>>
>> Before I re-build and put data onto a potential bad disk, is there a
>> tool / utility that I can use to check the disk before hand?
>>
>>
>
> fsck etc only work on file systems - to do a hardware check you’ll probably
> need specialist software supplied by the HDD manufacturer
>
> Check out Ultimate Boot CD http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
>
> Alan
>
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6

Also, if the disks have smart functionality (and it’s enabled), you
might get good readings from that.

Basically use smartctl to read out the values for each disk (e.g.
smartctl /dev/sda -a).

Cheers,
Wj

–
Have allot of fun! WJM

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7

In addition, have a look here on how to use smart(ctl):

‘Linux Harddisk Monitoring with SmartMonTools (smartctl)’
(http://www.captain.at/howto-linux-smartmontools-smartctl.php)

There also an option to let a disk do a self test (quick upto rigid).

–
Have allot of fun! WJM

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