Checking For A Failed Drive

Getting slow performance?....lots of hard drive activity when nothings running?...copy/move commands coming up failed due to read only...you might have a failed drive. However before you toss the drive out you can do some hard drive checks.

Perform a SMART system test

Open the "Disk Utility" under the MENU->ACCESSORIES menu in Linux Mint XFCE, and look at the SMART results or perform a test

If you dont have that you can run the test via command line. The following examples will use /dev/sdb as the hard drive to test, replace with your drive of choice. first install the required packages.

sudo apt-get install smartmontools

Check if smart is enabled:

smartctl -i /dev/sdb

If not enabled, enable it:

smartctl -s on -d ata /dev/sdb

Run a health test:

smartctl -d ata -H /dev/sdb

Or a extented health test

smartctl -d ata -t long /dev/sdb

If a failure is listed this will give more detail:

smartctl --attributes --log=selftest /dev/sdb

Check The Filesystem

First unmount the filesystem
sudo umount /dev/sdb

Run a check on a EXT4 filesystem:

sudo fsck -t ext4 /dev/sdb1

If using EXT2/3 File Systems use:

sudo e2fsck -c -C -y /dev/sdb1 OR e2fsck -c -c -C -y /dev/sdb1

Check The Filesystem Automatically

Automatically all debian based systems will check the file system every X reboots. You can see exactly after how many time your system checks via:
sudo tune2fs -l /dev/sdb1

Look for ""mount count"" parameter. Usually 32 I beleive. You can change this to howevery manu you want, replace X with how many boot ups to check.

sudo tune2fs -c X /dev/sdb1

Check The The Hard Drive For Bad Blocks

sudo badblocks -snv /dev/sdb1

If you get any bad blocks from this command showing you can try to fix it and mark the spots but your best bet is to back up your date (WHICH YOU DO REGULARILY RIGHT?) and replace it.