[COLUG] Is the drive dead or not?

[Jim Dinan]

Brian Miller wrote:
> What does the BIOS tell you when you boot up?  Does the system see the hard 
> drive?   Some newer systems have a drive check feature built into the BIOS.  
> If your system offers that, you might try running the hardware check on the 
> disk.

You can also use smartmontools to access the drive's SMART functionality
(http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/ or package smartmontools in
Ubuntu).  This will let you read back any hardware fault messages and
also perform self tests.

 -Jim.