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inac
Asked: 2010-06-12 06:55:30 +0800 CST

Check for hard disk errors / signs of failure on CentOS Server

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What's the best way to check for HDD errors and early signs of failure on CentOS?

hard-drive centos corruption

6 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I would recommend installing smartmon (http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki) to your machine this is some software which can check the health of your disks otherwise its going to be checking /var/log/messages or /var/log/syslog for any mentions of scsi errors

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  2. dmesg

    The kernel will log any diagnostic messages about I/O devices, so you can check those messages out with the dmesg command.

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  3. SMART monitoring is a good way. As root, smartctl -a /dev/hda, where hda is the drive you want... could be hdb, sda, etc. Also recommend setting your email address in /etc/aliases as the person who should get root's mail.

    That's a very vague answer though. If you have a server made by any of the big manufacturers (Dell, HP, etc), chances are there are better monitoring capabilities available.

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  4. You can run fsck on the device to check for errors.

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  5. As Paul says, the SMART logs are a good place to check.

    I'd also recommend running BadBlocks. If you've got a RAID card, you might have to use the monitoring on that.

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  6. You can try full check of partition /dev/sda1 (for example) as

    fsck -f /dev/sda1

    or, try full write-read non-descructive test of given partition

    badblocks -vn /dev/sda1
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