Checking hard drive for head failures
by mike_canada from LinuxQuestions.org on (#5459Y)
Until recently, my laptop computer was running Slackware 13 fine.
Then I seemed to have overloaded it once by running the memory-gobbling firefox, a 700 MB mp4 video in VLC and KDE services. The hard drive area was hot. While the video ran I did use an older browser but things ran somewhat slow.
So I shutdown my computer via software, did some house chores, and then came back to it in about 3 hours.
Now this time, as soon as I turned my computer on, before the post screen ended, the hard drive acted like it wanted to fail miserably (repeating loud knocks). Anyways, went through the boot sequence once, and right around where the hard drive is detected in linux, I heard a bunch of knocks and some seek error messages then everything else booted.
Then I tried a lower speed setting in my bios. Didn't really help.
But the part that really helped me the most is me inserting my slackware 13 boot CD and mounting the drive. I don't know why.
When I read other forums it seems like my issue is that not enough power is being given to the hard drive to function properly, yet mine is an internal IDE. Then again maybe the CPU hogged everything because of the video :( I only have one CPU in my computer.
So anyways, just to see how things really are doing, I want to be able to use my slackware 13 CD 1 bootable CD-ROM to test my hard drive in its entirety without mounting any filesystem.
I am able to mount and chroot to the drive from the CD-ROM
but when I tried to execute this:
Code:fsck /dev/hda1it can't seem to find a file named fsck.(insert filetype here).
My hard drive has 2 filesystems in 3 partitions: Fat32 (which linux recognizes as VFAT), and ext3.
How do I scan these filesystems for disk errors with fsck? or is there a better tool that I could use that's already installed on the slackware CD that can do this for me?
Then I seemed to have overloaded it once by running the memory-gobbling firefox, a 700 MB mp4 video in VLC and KDE services. The hard drive area was hot. While the video ran I did use an older browser but things ran somewhat slow.
So I shutdown my computer via software, did some house chores, and then came back to it in about 3 hours.
Now this time, as soon as I turned my computer on, before the post screen ended, the hard drive acted like it wanted to fail miserably (repeating loud knocks). Anyways, went through the boot sequence once, and right around where the hard drive is detected in linux, I heard a bunch of knocks and some seek error messages then everything else booted.
Then I tried a lower speed setting in my bios. Didn't really help.
But the part that really helped me the most is me inserting my slackware 13 boot CD and mounting the drive. I don't know why.
When I read other forums it seems like my issue is that not enough power is being given to the hard drive to function properly, yet mine is an internal IDE. Then again maybe the CPU hogged everything because of the video :( I only have one CPU in my computer.
So anyways, just to see how things really are doing, I want to be able to use my slackware 13 CD 1 bootable CD-ROM to test my hard drive in its entirety without mounting any filesystem.
I am able to mount and chroot to the drive from the CD-ROM
but when I tried to execute this:
Code:fsck /dev/hda1it can't seem to find a file named fsck.(insert filetype here).
My hard drive has 2 filesystems in 3 partitions: Fat32 (which linux recognizes as VFAT), and ext3.
How do I scan these filesystems for disk errors with fsck? or is there a better tool that I could use that's already installed on the slackware CD that can do this for me?