Other Help Topics :: Hard disk acting up....

My hard disk on this old notebook has been acting up.

I was thinking of reloading DSL with the latest version anyway and wanted to know what linux tools/commands I can use to check out the integrity of the disk.

Anyway to get it to do a low level format to mark any bad sectors, etc....

Thanks in advance...

Try "badblocks -svw /dev/hda" (without quotes) - not quite sure about the options though. This will overwrite your disk completely (i.e. wipe it) four times. If you don't want to wipe it, I think you can run it without the -w option.

original here.