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Hello lain, I'm trying to use an old HDD as a replacement because my current one is smaller, the issue however is that it's corrupted or so do I think, how would you guys go about checking it's health? I deleted every partition on it before creating a new partition and formatted it without the quick format option on windows, I have no idea how to fix it and I know what I'm doing is kinda like reinventing the wheel, what would you lainons do? for context, it was used as a windows disk, I intent to install Linux on it, I'm formatting it to NTFS because windows moment.

Check for bad sectors I guess. There's utilities for that even in the Windows safe boot menu so don't dl some shady exe for that. Data corruption may occur from both hardware and software failure, meaning the drive can be a-ok but the machine just happened to shut down exactly during a critical operation and now some data or even partition index tables are goofed. Still, regard it as a hardware failure and never keep any critical data as a sole copy on it. Some distros like MX-Linux installer make it very easy to select a different drive for your home directory so you could use it for a systems drive. But if it isn't an M2-SSD then things will be slow for today's standards. Preferably use a good condition drive for your data and keep backups. Ideally such a questionable drive would be great for automatic file mirroring but sadly there aren't many good solutions around for home use and iirc BTRFS still has bugs in their RAID implementation. In short if you have some money, don''t take the risk.

>>79312 use crystaldiskinfo if ur on windows or crazydiskinfo if ur on linux.

>old HDD >for context, it was used as a windows disk dying probably, last time I used winblows the hard disk was so constantly in use that it made it sound like an angle grinder (normal sounds, not mechanical failure)

>>79312 Reformat it. If it reads and writes okay after, I wouldn't worry too much about it. You should be backing your files up regardless. Although, if you plan to install an OS on there you'd be better off buy a $20 ssd, installing linux on that, and mount the HDD for additional bulk storage. Even with Linux an ssd will speed up your system significantly.

I have an HDD that a decade ago had failed sectors and it still is working but it's slow.

>>79312 >how would you guys go about checking it's health? Most disks have a built in self test in the SMART system. >smartmontools Also various OS utilities can read every single sector on the disk in linear order and verify they are readable >badblocks (unix) , hdtune (windows) If the disk shows any bad sectors its time to replace it. The disk has builtin spares to replace bad ones, and if your observing bad sectors, the disk has run out or isn't working.

I exclusively use 2nd hand / dumpster-dived drives, I've had many drive failures. I have a drive in my system right now that has a bad sector. stuff like SMART is supposed to tell you when the drive goes bad, but that's the drive informing you about itself. I've had failing drives pass selftests, and usable drives fail selftests. I no longer attach much value to SMART. If you want to test it, use a tool that writes/reads every sector of the disk and observes errors, or even better: use a filesystem with checksumming and just start using it. BTRFS for windows works great. >>79314 > would be great for automatic file mirroring This is how I get away with it. Once a drive starts failing I already have a copy in RAID, and the system counts the failures for me to see. >iirc BTRFS still has bugs in their RAID Only RAID5/6 are suspect, and it is like kicking dead whales down the beach to have to avoid that, but I think being able to mix differently-sized drives more than makes up for the loss.

>>81671 There are different self-tests. Short (~1 min) and conveyance (~5 min) don't test everything. Extended (tens of minutes to several hours), also called "long", can read-write test the whole disk. Offline tests (including extended) can be done while the drive is operating, the disk firmware is supposed to pause the test when the OS needs the drive.