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Payson Welch
Asked: 2011-09-01 10:50:47 +0800 CST

What is the easiest way to run a boot level surface scan?

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I have a PowerEdge 1850 running two SCSI Ultra 320 drives (10k 73gb). I am looking for recommendations on boot disks / methods to run a boot time surface scan. I would like to do this at boot time because I have lots of drives to test and don't want to install an OS on all of them.

I am also looking for a fairly generic solution that is not tied to a particular drive brand.

hard-drive boot diagnostic dell-poweredge

4 Answers

  1. If you don't want to spend any money, download a Linux livecd (my favorite http://www.sysresccd.org/), and run badblocks.

    • Non destructive read and write test, badblocks -c 2048 -sn /dev/sdi
      • this will re-write every block.
    • Destructive read and write test badblocks -c 2048 -sw /dev/sde
    • Read only test badblocks -c 2048 -s /dev/sde

    The -c option tells it to operate on more then 1 block at a time, which allows it to run faster. If you have lots of memory then larger values will help. On my 1GB system I typically use -c 10240.

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  2. There's always a chance for issues with raid-controllers... in that without an OS and drivers, there is no way to access the disks. Sometimes, (on good controllers anyway) the raid-controller will operate in some sort of simple-mode until the drivers are loaded, and then you will be able to use the full feature-set of the raid controller. If this is the case, you can use almost any bootable disk tools to do almost anything to the disks.

    I highly recommend looking at GRC's spinRite as it's probably the best tool for doing surface scans & recovery. It's completely OS agnostic, so it doesn't matter if you're using windows or linux or whatever flavor of OS/file-system/whatever on that disk. They have ISO bootable images as well as thumb-drive based images you can use to boot directly into the tool without an existing OS on the machine as well.

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  3. Try SpinRite from http://www.grc.com

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  4. Have you tried using the PowerEdge diagnostics from Dell? These are usually accessible from the POST screen, and can also be downloaded as a CD image from Dell's support site (double-check the version and its compatibility with your server).

    Otherwise SpinRite is a great generic tool as others have already suggested.

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