[TriLUG] identifying hard drive errors

[Joseph Tate]

Usually /var/log/messages is very verbose with harddrive messages.  I'm 
not sure what exactly to look for, but glance through there to see if 
you see any warning signs.  If it is indeed a harddrive error.

What I'd do is boot the machine into single user mode (maybe off of 
Tom's root boot or similar), turn off any swap space, and then run 
memtest, or some other resource (non-disk) intensive job.  If the system 
still hangs, you know it's not the disk, running hdparm on the disk 
after a stability test may be enlightening.  Of course this may not 
prove anything unless you can manage to boot the system using the same 
kernel and drivers as is stored on the disk.  In any case, you'd 
probably better back up any important data on that disk.

Michael Hrivnak wrote:
> What sort of problem does this sound like?  How can I further diagnose it?