kriso@lombard.dartmouth.edu (Kris Olander) (04/16/91)
Does anyone know of a utility that would allow us to check for bad disk sectors on HP9000 model 340s. In my (albeit minimal) purusing of the extensive documentation, I couldn't find such a utility. There's nothing in either of the Sys. Admin. manuals in the index under "format", or "bad block". The "File System" section of the Sys. Admin. Concepts manual didn't indicate that there was such a thing as a 'bad blocks' sector on the hard disk. What does one do if he/she suspects that a portion of his/her hard disk has developed some bad sectors? Only reference of 'defective blocks' was in the mediainit man page. -- Kris Olander --------------kris.olander@dartmouth.edu----------------
kinsell@hpfcdj.HP.COM (Dave Kinsell) (04/18/91)
>What does one do if he/she suspects that a portion >of his/her hard disk has developed some bad sectors? Depends somewhat on whether you have HP-IB or SCSI disks, but there are also similarities. On a running system, you should check msgbuf with the dmesg(1m) command. I/O errors get logged there. With SCSI disks, you might see messages like: "Unrecovered Read Error" "No Record Found" "Recovered Read Data with Target's Read Retries" "Recovered Read Data with Target's ECC Correction" You may want to scan the entire disk to systematically check for bad blocks. Using dd to copy the raw device to /dev/null with bs=64k works nicely for this. On a production system, you might want to scan the disks every night to check for sectors going bad. Specifically for HP-IB disks, there is a program /usr/diag/CE.utilities/CS80/exerciser that is intended for use by service personel. There's nothing being officially distributed for SCSI disks at the moment, but I could supply an exerciser if you'd like to use it. It does read/write tests of the volume, and can spare single bad sectors. Regards Dave Kinsell kinsell@hpfcmb.hp.com ^ | yes, I work for HP