[COLUG] Is the drive dead or not?

[Kent Broestl]

if it will not unmount, I think the read/write head is stuck in the position 
it was in when it got kicked. IMHO no amount of software testing will do any 
good because the read/write head isn't moving.
-- David M.

Well, that is what I am afraid of. I want to check this disk any way 
that I can to completely rule out a software fault.
> Kent Broestl wrote:
>
>   
>> Bios sees the drive. Fsck on boot recognizes that it is ext3. It tries 
>> to run fsck.ext3 -a /dev/hdf1 and fails (exit status 9).
>>     
>
> What does smartctl tell you about the drive? 
>
> http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/man/smartctl.8.html
>
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>   
This (along with the gparted solution provided by Paul Williams) is 
exactly the kind of advice that I am looking for. I fear that the drive 
is physically destroyed, but I want to rule out everything else.

# smartctl -a /dev/hdf1 after doing an extended self-check (smartctl 
-t=long /dev/hdf1) results in the following lines:

Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error
# 1 Extended offline Completed without error 00% 13038 -

So the disk is okay? It doesn't seem to have found any errors?