Hard Drive Test software : like a memory test? (from Usb)

[perfessor101]

Hello,

 

I was curious if there is any freeware hard disk testing software out there that runs from USB and will write random patterns to a disk and check those patterns?

 

or if some one can tell me how to put a Spinrite image on a USB stick ? (I bought it and don't want to remove drives to put in a DVD burner)

 

I have unRaid 4.3.3 on a usb stick and it works fine with two seagate 1 TB sata drives.

When I add this (see next line) maxtor drive I have parity check errors like crazy on this drive ... but all diagnostics attempted so far say the drive is good.

 

I have a Maxtor 6B250R0 250GB IDE drive (two actually) and they were so successful that within 6 months almost all references to them were deleted from the Maxtor website. 

 

I am trying to use it on an Abit AN7 mother board (Nforce 2 Ultra 400 chipset with Silicon Image 3112 for sata) with unRaid. 

Seatools Long Tests come up clean ... the Smart long tests from 'unRaid' are also clean.

 

Now I'm trying to find some type of software that does test patterns on the disk so I know more than the drive allows reads and writes.

 

Thanks for your time,

Bobby

[SSD]

Putting spinrite on a USB stick is pretty easy.  All you need to do is format the USB to boot into DOS.  Then just copy spinrite.exe to the USB from the CD (or floppy).  After the USB boots, just type in "SPINRITE" at the DOS prompt.

 

Spinrite seems to flake out wth drives over about 500G in my experience.

 

I wrote up a pretty good 2 drive burn in process a while back.  Check the "Best of" link in my sig and search for "Procedure to Burn-in Two New Drives ".

 

Smartctl is a tool that will enable you to access the SMART features of the hard drives themselves.  There is a SHORT and a LONG test that is available.  The short one completes in just a couple of minutes, whereas the long test takes hours.

 

[perfessor101]

I've done the smart tests long and short on the drives ... I'll try saving the logs from two separate runs like you suggested and look for differences.

 

I already wiped my unRaid usb flash (Rar'd it before wiping) and put Ultimate Boot CD 5.05b on it and was doing further drive testing with Seatools and PowerMax (as I have in the past with this drive) then I found this link ...

 

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=4153

 

How to add custom floppy images to the UBCD and that link explains how to add spinrite to menus and where to put the floppy image in the UBCD 5 directory structure.

 

The drive always seems to test as good no matter what software I use to test it ... but it still seems to have data integrity issues ... (nothing seems to confirm the drive as bad other than my perception of it as a ... sharp pain in the Rutabaga)

 

Is there a simple script I could use to write an ascending or changing pattern to the drive (in a file a few gigs long) and then when it reads the data from the file ... confirms the data is as expected ?

 

Thanks for your time,

Bobby

 

ps - next time I'll download the syslog before I wipe the flash ;-)

[perfessor101]

Okay the UBCD modifications weren't going well on the UBCD 5.05b so I switched to doing a PXE boot of the system with tftpd32 which turned out to be really easy ;-)

 

I followed the instructions here :

http://home.allegiance.tv/~joem298/

 

and I got my Spinrite image loaded in seconds ...

 

I think I may move some of my other diagnostics utilities into this if I can ... much simpler

 

Bobby