Download Smartmontools & Gsmartcontrol, once installed open
gsmartcontrol, you can then select the disk you want to test and then
goto Device >> Perform test then select Extended Test, this should take
between 20 to 30 minutes. If you boot from a live Distro on a USB , you
should be able to download them to the live distro and run them, but you
will lose any data once you shutdown or reboot.
Hope this helps
Tim H
On 14/12/2025 10:18, Terry Coles wrote:
On 14/12/2025 10:08, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
I see:
https://www.hadrian-way.co.uk/Misc/SDA1_SMART_Report.htm
234 Unrecoverable ECC Count 539 sectors
https://www.hadrian-way.co.uk/Misc/SDA2_SMART_Report.htm
234 Unrecoverable ECC Count 52,934 sectors
The second looks high to me. Of particular interest would be the rate
of change, but you'd need a history of results to grep those out.
Hmm. The result of both SMART tests was 'Success'. I (perhaps
naively) took it to mean all tests passed, but maybe it just means
tests completed. The result on sda2 is the /home partition; would
that prevent booting?
I like Tim's suggestion: boot from another media, and run checks on the
two drives. Also, filesystems like ext4 can have a ‘run fsck every
N mounts’ setting. That's often set quite high. If you don't mind
slowing down booting, it can be tuned lower so problems are spotted
sooner
when they may need just a stich in time. See tune2fs(8)'s -c and -C.
I have an old copy of Parted Magic, I'll try running that.
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