Harddrive testing

Rovanion

I got a problem you see.

I was playing around with different distros on my Portable Media Player. Namely a Cowon A3 with a 60GB harddrive. And so it came that I stupidly enough entered gparted and added a boot flag to the one partition on my PMP to see if it maybe would make it bootable on my old computer without USB support in BIOS. Well, the end result was that the PMP itself did no longer recognize that it had any software to boot and therefor stopped working as anything but a USB harddrive.

Long story short: I sent it in to get it restored to factory settings. But the companie turns around telling me that the harddrive is broken and because of that needs to be replaced. And for that to be done it must be sent around the world and back making it unnecessarily expensive. Especially since I know that the harddrive is not broken. I just screwed around with it a bit too much.

So what I need now is software to test my USB harddrive for errors. Much like memtest86 works for RAM.

I need something that I can later print out and bring on paper to the store to tell them that this harddrive works perfectly fine. There is nothing wrong with it, it is just you who thought I dropped it like everyone else. And yes I got the drive here by my side right now.

So please tell me where to turn for this software. I have tried fsck on it and it worked out great. But doesn't that only check the filesystem for corruption. At the moment the filesystem is empty so there isn't much there that could be wrong.

I want something to write a bunch of nonesense over and over again on this drive for 12 hours and come back with the result I already know. Still a result I have to prove according to Swedish consumer law. It's two years ago since I bought it so I'm still covered by the law.

fedev

Have you tried to remove the boot flag to see if it goes back to work?

If what you want to do is write things to the disk to see if there was any error you could use dd and send random input to the disk. But that is not of course a test that will produce a nice report telling you if you have any problems and you will likely ruin whatever is on the disk. I think there is an utility called TestDisk that could do better. This takes me to the following question.

Isn't the PMP using part of the disk for its own files? If so, I don't think you can test the disk unless you remove it from the PMP and attach it to a computer. Otherwise the best you get is to test the partition the PMP is allowing you to use as a HDD.

If you open it and attach it to a computer for sure will void the warranty, but you might have a chance at repairing it on your own. Check on the net to see if the Cowon A3 OS can somehow be re-installed.

Rovanion

Did I mention that the harddrive has been reformatted?
Anyhow there is no data on it that I currently care of so whatever test-suit there may be it can go ballistics on it.

And yes the PMP uses parts of the disk for it's own files but those are now gone, caput. There no more. If that weren't the case there would have been no problem in the first place.

Rovanion

BUMP

Is there any good harddrive testing software out there?

Or is there any other way that I can test the integrity of my harddrive?

Goineasy9

Why don't you take a look at Hiren's ... seems that there is every sort of testing program on the CD. I carry it in my kit. Yeah, not all of it is open source, but, if you can't find it on system rescue cd, then look at Hiren's.

mfillpot

I am moving this thread to the hardware -> Storage section to hopefully yield more responses.

Rovanion

Didn't find any downloadlink at the official site. But after some googling I've found a download. Hopefully it's full of rootkits...

BTW
I got an idea. Couldn't I fill up the harddrive with the same file over and over again. And after the drive is full I would md5 them and match it to the md5 of the original file. Would this give any good results or will there be errors because of other things than the harddrive itself?

Goineasy9

If you were looking for the download link for Hirens, here it is:
http://www.hirensbootcd.net/

Download button right under the "select a version" in the middle of the page. (I know you saw it...lol...just pinpointing.)