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View Full Version : Drive diagnostics in Linux?

klgood1
02-10-2006, 05:11 PM
Well, a day before I was going to yank my Tivo's flaky hard drives and copy my recordings to a new drive, it finally gave up the ghost & died on me (I think.) :(

I want to run diagnostics on the drive, but I'm not that familiar with how to do it without formatting and using Windows/DOS utilities. Can somebody direct me to some utilities/instructions? I saw the Ultimate Boot CD -- will that do the trick? FYI, one hard drive is a Maxtor, and one is a Seagate. I just want to see which one's dead, and why. If I can possibly repair it and copy the recordings, I want to do that before formatting/overwriting the drives.
Markman07
02-10-2006, 05:23 PM
If you don't mind spending $80 a program called SpinRite from www.grc.com could help! It can be used for recovering and more importantly you can use it on all your computer drives at times to keep the disk as healthy as humanly possible. I own it and it has saved not just my tivo drives but my regular drives also...
DBCooper
03-18-2008, 11:16 AM
The reference to http://alt.org/wiki/index.php/TivoDiagnostics doesn't seem to work. Could be a temporary system problem, could be a missing DB entry. Is there any other source of this material?
Worf
03-19-2008, 01:13 AM
alt.org has been down a long time - don't think it's temporary - it's been down for months. (the site is up, the wiki is down, though).
ciper
03-19-2008, 02:11 AM
Spinrite is indeed very good software. I've been using it for at least 11 years.
JamieP
03-20-2008, 10:24 AM
The reference to http://alt.org/wiki/index.php/TivoDiagnostics doesn't seem to work. Could be a temporary system problem, could be a missing DB entry. Is there any other source of this material?
There's always the wayback machine (http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://alt.org/wiki/index.php/TivoDiagnostics). The Jun 09, 2007 version is the last good one.

To come back to the question in the original subject (linux drive diagnostic tools), modern drives have built in diagnostics via S.M.A.R.T. The smartctl (http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/man/smartctl.8.html) utility lets you run them via the --test command line option.