Testing Hard Drives
“Results and actually hard drive names may vary”
What you need
- Working hard-drive with working linux/unix operation system OR CD of BackTrack
- Another hard-drive That may or may not be functional.
- Two interfaces to connect such hard-drive (if using IDE interface make sure the working one is master)
- Adminstration right on the operation system being used
Getting Started
Open your terminal on working operation system and inside type the following.
:~$ dmesg|grep 'hda'|less
What you are doing is looking for the hard-drive that is being tested (if you already know the name of the hard-drive you can skip this step). If not than what you are looking for is most likely hda and some number after it which if it is the slave drive than most likely is hda2.
Then do…
:~$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=8M
:~$ sudo fdisk /dev/"name of the hard-drive"
Now that you are adminstrator type “p” to print out all the partions on the hard-drive. If there is no partions just type “n” to create one, just make it a primary and use defaults. However if there is multiple partions type “d” and than the number of the partion. After deletig all the partions create just one.
after all of this type “w” to save all of this. Than type..
Trouble-shooting
Check jumpers and make sure that the computer has the working os as the master drive and the tested drive as the slave. If using OS use the first command if no hda than check wirers and jumpers.