Re: [Blind-sysadmins] testing an external drive

Barry, Did Steve have anything interesting to say about sr's accessibility or did he just suggest using JFw? I've never used the product so I'm not sure how easily JFW could be integrated into SR's bootdisk? Personally, for us, I think a better option would probably be some sort of linux terminal app used from a live cd. Cheers, Ben. On 3/22/12, Ben Mustill-Rose wrote:

Hi,

Part of the problem is that you can't really get SMART info over USB. I have lots of things that aren't meant to be taken apart; most of them have met my screw driver at one point in time and are all more or less working. If you really don't want to take it apart, you could try using Seatools from Seagate; it works on non Seagate drives so you should be ok. Personally I'd just break the enclosure, plug the drive in directly to a motherboard, get much more accurate test results, buy a really cheap enclosure and chawk the money up as experience in taking an external apart. I sell hard drives on eBay and I used to test them over USB a few years ago, but you just can't get the info that you need to determin if somethings working or not. Apart from SMART a good example is speed; USB 2 is the bottlenec for spinning SATA II drives so if you were to run something like hddTune which gives you speed related info, you might be seeing a fairly constant 40MB or so read for the entire drive. Obviously you're seeing the USB effect here, but what you might not be seeing is a part of the drive that is noticeabley slower than other parts which would be a cause for concern.

In your situation it just sounds like a bit of water damage which was shorting something; I've been experimenting with water damaged motherboards and usually the board won't power on for a while after the spill. Sometimes after its dried out it will work again; other times you'll need to brush all of the dirt off it / wash in distilled water and dry before it will work.

You should probably be able to carry on using it making sure you have backups, but you should have backups anyway right?

Cheers, Ben.

On 3/21/12, Andrew Hodgson wrote:

...

Hi,

I used to run Spinrite a lot from a Windows boot disk running Hal Lite with a Juno speech synth and it worked fine. The issue we have now is no support for software synths under DOS, which is what Spinrite runs under.

Andrew.

-----Original Message----- From: blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Barry Toner Sent: 21 March 2012 23:11 To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] testing an external drive

Hi,

I have some private messeges with Steve Gibson and he said that it's just DOS that SR runs in. He reckoned JFW for DOS should load. Though it could have been Free DOS he meant, in which case I'm not sure if a Screen Reader can be ran from.

I'd certainly be interested in any SR walkthroughs, with or without speech.

Cheers, Barry.

-----Original Message----- From: blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Jackie McBride Sent: 21 March 2012 23:03 To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] testing an external drive

Spinrite can test USB drives if your bios is set to support it. Most newer bioses do now, but the name of the setting differs. However, spinrite, from my experience, at least, wasn't accessible.

There are lots of smart monitoring/diagnostic utils out there. I can't remember which 1 I've used--it's been awhile. Google's your best friend, in case some1 on list can't provide more info--I'm actually headed out now very quickly so time is at a premium.

First thing I think I'd do is a chkdsk on that drive using the /f & /r options to fix any file system errors/bad sectors.

On 3/21/12, David Mehler wrote:

...

Hello,

I know about spinrite, but I didn't think that worked on usb-attached external drives.

I've got a terabyte external drive connected by usb, it's an enclosure, but not removable, i.e. the drive came in it and it's sealed not meant to be replaced. This enclosure took a spill and hit a carpeted ground apartment say maybe four feet and it didn't show up for a while. I recycled it, disconnected and reconnected everything, and it shows up but it took what looks like casing damage and I'm hoping it didn't take internal damage, it's not making any noises and it is showing up again, I'd like to know what others use to test their external drives? Also on the subject, is anyone using the network-attached terabyte or greater drive? Which one can be recommended?

Thanks. Dave.

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