[TriLUG] HD Diags -- General comment

[Brian A. Henning]

Hi,
  Most, if not all, HD manufacturers (i.e. Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor,
etc) publish their own low-level disk diagnostic utilities.  9 times out of
10, these are in the form of a bootable floppy, making the diagnosis of your
ix86 OS-independent.  The only minor setback there is often these are
distributed via self-writing disk images (the image and a writer packaged
into a single Windows executable), but presuming you have a Windows box
nearby, that shouldn't be a problem (I have no idea if these would work
under a Windows emulator).
  So my suggestion is, *after* backing up all the important bits, download
the diags for your particular HD model from that HD manufacturer's website
and run them.  Some manufacturers also provide the ability to check your
warranty status based on your device's serial number and, if applicable,
start the RMA process online, without ever having to interact with any pesky
humans. ;-)

  Also, in most of the manufacturer's diagnostics that I've seen, there are
both destructive and non-destructive test sets.

Cheers and HTH,
~Brian