Re: data-preserving HDD diagnostic program?

On Thu, 15 Aug 2024 11:29:45 -0400, Winston wrote:

Is there a good FreeBSD HDD diagnostic program?
 
The SATA III disk drive I'd like to test is either partially failing or
has corrupted data.  MS Win10's "repair" of the drive isn't fixing it.
For that and other reasons, I suspect the drive has partially died
(such as maybe 1 head died or something).
 
In any case, I'd like to test it while preserving the data on it.
E.g., read a block and save its content, write 0101s, verify 0101s,
write 1010s, verify 1010s, write back original content, verify, print
map of what failed.
 
It's maybe not all that hard to write such a program, but there are
probably things like disabling low-level retries and any FreeBSD
caching I know less about.
 
In any case, is there such a diagnostic?
 

Look in /usr/ports/sysutils.  There are several tools such as
smartmontools, hdrecover, recoverdm, etc.

--
steve