[wellylug] Testing hard disks

[Ewen McNeill]

In message <1063759865.24450.21.camel at galadrial.shire>, Nigel Walters writes:
>I want to test some old hard disks to find out if they are working
>correctly before installing a system on them and finding out they are
>less than perfect. 

badblocks -w 

That's what I do with old hard drives -- it does a 4 pass write/compare
test on the drive. 

Actually I tend to do this on new hard drives -- at least a read test --
if I've got time, as I've had various new hard drives over the years
that simply didn't work properly and needed to be returned.

Ewen