Filesystems, Disks and Memory

How do I check for physical damage on red hat linux hard disks? I tried smartctl /dev/sdb but it came back so fast saying it was ok. Is there a better linux command to check for bad sectors or physical disks in linux? Is there a good way such as with parted or something else? I normally in HP use the ioscan and if it says NO_Hardware then know the disk is bad. Thanks.

you could do a dd raw read test or boot off a vendor supplied cd and run diagnostics. seagate and western digital have diagnostics freely available.

Do you have the command line for the dd?

it might take a while depending on the size of the disk. you have more options if you can write to the disk. also check out badblocks(8)

Code:

# changing blocksize may speed up things.
# make sure there are no I/O read errors
dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/null bs=1024k

Also keep an eye on /var/log/messages while this is running.

Thank you Frank. I am running the dd command and tailing var/log messages to see if it shows anything. My gut tells me there is nothing wrong with the disk and the problems resulted as of the server being powered down with oracle running and oracle having issues with that factor. Thanks again and have a nice XMAS by the way.

Henry