Welcome to hdck project web site, as you can see, it's quite rudimentary. I hope it will change in the future though. It will serve as the program's manual for now.
The only supported operating system for now is Linux, the program doesn't require any Linux
specific features though, so porting it to other UNIX OSs should be trivial as the only
dependency is glibc.
To compile the program, download the latest package from our file repository or SVN tracker and run make:
make
If the compilation succeeds, you'll get one executable file: hdck. You can either
copy it to /sbin or just run it from local directory. The rest of this manual
will assume the former option.
If you just want to test the only disk in your PC, run the program as this:
hdck -f /dev/sda
While the program is running (it can take from half an hour up to 12h) it will print progress informaiton in form similar to the one below:
hdck status:
============
Loop: 1 of 1
Progress: 2.87%, 2.87% total
Read: 56064000 sectors of 1000204795904
Speed: 121.408MiB/s, average: 94.588MiB/s
Elapsed time: 00:04:49
Expected time: 02:47:50
Samples: Blocks:
< 2.1ms: 190880 190788
< 4.2ms: 26886 26877
< 8.3ms: 13 13
<16.7ms: 661 642
<33.3ms: 130 113
<50.0ms: 201 28
>50.0ms: 26 175
ERR : 0 0
Intrrpt: 203 364
What everything means will be explained later
At the end it will print summary similar to this:
results:
possible latent bad sectors or silent realocations:
block 152604 (LBA: 39066624-39066879) rel std dev: 0.092528082, average: 249.413991, valid: yes, samples: 2
block 152605 (LBA: 39066880-39067135) rel std dev: 0.663862467, average: 20.201437, valid: yes, samples: 6
block 365753 (LBA: 93632768-93633023) rel std dev: 0.000327480, average: 18.547844, valid: yes, samples: 2
block 499546 (LBA: 127883776-127884031) rel std dev: 0.667183390, average: 17.377143, valid: yes, samples: 2
block 525720 (LBA: 134584320-134584575) rel std dev: 0.550697986, average: 23.005352, valid: yes, samples: 3
block 1558769 (LBA: 399044864-399045119) rel std dev: 0.668017125, average: 17.565852, valid: yes, samples: 2
block 3375615 (LBA: 864157440-864157695) rel std dev: 0.000375852, average: 16.047311, valid: yes, samples: 5
block 3843711 (LBA: 983990016-983990271) rel std dev: 0.746113563, average: 23.568186, valid: yes, samples: 2
block 4482182 (LBA: 1147438592-1147438847) rel std dev: 0.000182737, average: 34.318936, valid: yes, samples: 2
block 5190989 (LBA: 1328893184-1328893439) rel std dev: 0.661462207, average: 17.735146, valid: yes, samples: 2
block 5308850 (LBA: 1359065600-1359065855) rel std dev: 2.027333942, average: 10.417865, valid: yes, samples: 8
block 5530828 (LBA: 1415891968-1415892223) rel std dev: 0.659776245, average: 17.776946, valid: yes, samples: 2
block 5953060 (LBA: 1523983360-1523983615) rel std dev: 0.000690584, average: 16.329662, valid: yes, samples: 5
block 6404576 (LBA: 1639571456-1639571711) rel std dev: 0.739413966, average: 23.795692, valid: yes, samples: 2
block 7540426 (LBA: 1930349056-1930349311) rel std dev: 0.702445124, average: 16.701053, valid: yes, samples: 2
15 uncertain blocks found
wall time: 15182s.452ms.368µs.313ns
sum time: 11930s.717ms.78µs
tested 7630957 blocks (0 errors, 8411636 samples)
mean block time: 0s.1ms.409µs
std dev: 0.758969303(ms)
Number of invalid blocks because of detected interrupted reads: 0
Number of interrupted reads: 2296
Individual block statistics:
<2.08ms: 6569056
<4.17ms: 1048557
<8.33ms: 1793
<16.67ms: 11539
<33.33ms: 10
<50.00ms: 1
>50.00ms: 1
ERR: 0
Worst blocks:
block no st.dev avg tr. avg max min valid samples
1558769 11.7343 17.57 17.57 25.86 9.27 yes 2
5190989 11.7311 17.74 17.74 26.03 9.44 yes 2
5530828 11.7288 17.78 17.78 26.07 9.48 yes 2
365753 0.0061 18.55 18.55 18.55 18.54 yes 2
152605 15.5012 20.20 21.63 34.07 0.64 yes 6
525720 12.6690 23.01 23.01 34.07 9.18 yes 3
3843711 17.5845 23.57 23.57 36.00 11.13 yes 2
6404576 17.5949 23.80 23.80 36.24 11.35 yes 2
4482182 0.0063 34.32 34.32 34.32 34.31 yes 2
152604 23.0778 249.41 249.41 265.73 233.10 yes 2
Disk status: CRITICAL
CAUTION! Sectors that required more than 6 read attempts detected, drive may be ALREADY FAILING!
As you can see from the status message, this drive is in critical condition.
Disk status can range from:
Basically any disk at very bad or worse requires administrator action (more on this later), lower levels can be considered as OK.
As with all IT systems, this program is no exceptio to the "garbage in, garbage out" rule. To get meaningful test results, the test environment must be ralatively calm.
Things to avoid: running downloads (especially torrents, but other p2p systems
are no exception) and any other intensive use of hdd, use iotop to
find other applications using the HDD. Applicaitons that frequently write to hdd
The usual culprits on desktop computers are
akonadi, nepomuk and nscd. All of them can be turned off.
Running tests on disk connected to computer using non native interface,
especially
USB or Firewire enclosures, some IDE-SATA bridges can degrade the meaningfulness
of data. Running in PIO mode or degraded DMA, all disks produced in last
5 years should work with UDMA 100 or UDMA 133 (check your dmsg). Basically, don't run
fast disk on limiting interface. If the disk is able to read at 60MiB/s (that's normal
for 120G 7200rpm HDDs) then UDMA-66 or any
PIO mode will be slow, so will be USB-2.0 or FireWire, older SCSI such as Ultra2, Ultra or
Ultra Wide SCSI will limit the drive too. I'm working on this now. Testing SSDs
is supported but meaningful, the only thing this applicaion will detect correctly are hard
read errors, and if SSD is in such state, it's long gone.
If the Interrpt row grows rapidly, it means that either something is wrong, usually
some background process keeps writing and flushing data, use iotop to confirm.
Sometimes using noatime helps:
mount -o remount,noatime /
TODO
$ Tomato42, 12 Sep 2010, 19:14:40 $