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Best system and software for testing and wiping 40MB - 3.2GB old hard disks?

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damian_m

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Jan 21, 2024
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Hi... So I test and sell hard disks and hard disk doner pcbs. Anything with SMART (I guess ~4.3GB and up) I have a process and it works well. GSmartcontrol and Nwipe in Linux, using external usb caddies.

I have hundreds of smaller 40mb upto 3.2gb (IDE and SCSI) disks, which I have just been letting pile up. But I need to have a decent way to test and wipe them. Also a Motherboard(s) that can recognise them.

Hazy memories make me think that later 486 motherboards had auto detect for the disk. Older PC's you had to type in cylinders, heads, landing zone etc.

As for software, I vaguely remember pccheck had a scanner, but I guess that will be hard to come across these days? So the first thing that comes to mind would be Dos 6.22, which at least has Scandisk which could find errors for me. I'm not sure what I could use for wiping, I know later versions of Format can write zeros (zeros is enough), but I dunno if that functionality is in 6.22? Maybe freedos has some tools?

Anyway, I'm looking for suggestions for an era of motherboard (or best BIOS manufacturer for HDD detection), and the software to do the job on that hardware (at a reasonable speed).

Thanks in advance
 
I test and exercise my old drives using a Linux system with a native IDE controller and a PCI SCSI adapter.
  • Linux is very good about identifying drives properly, including using CHS vs. LBA for IDE drives.
  • The DD command can be used to wipe out a drive, either by writing random numbers or zeros.
  • DDRESCUE can be used for trying to salvage data from drives that are having trouble.
  • And of course if the drive supports SMART then SMARTCTL will read the data so you can keep a log of drives and SMART results.
If you choose to use random numbers be careful with /dev/ device you use. One of them is pseudo random, which is good enough. The other gives you more randomness in the generated numbers, but it runs out of random numbers and blocks the write until more random numbers can be generated.
 
For SCSI drives, I use an Adaptec AHA-2940U PCI card that has a "low-level" format option in the BIOS. This wipes the drive and forces any bad sectors to re-map. Then, after DOS formatting I use Norton Disk Test to verify operation. Card works well with Linux, using "dd" to save or restore drive images.

For smaller IDE drives, I use MAXLLF to wipe drives, which also re-maps bad sectors. It does not support drives over 128gb or LBA48.
 
Hi... Linux is not a problem, it's my daily os, the problem is getting an old distro to run on a pc old enough to recognise (in the bios) a (say) 240MB ide disk. Or are you saying a modern(ISH) motherboard has no problem recognising a small disk, if it's on a proper PCI multi I/O, or PCI IDE card?
 
I'm using older hardware that has an integrated IDE controller, but still runs an up-to-date Linux. (Eventually that hardware won't be supported, but that's a different problem.)

If you can find something that has an integrated IDE controller it should properly handle old C/H/S only drives. But the only way to know is to try it and find out.

I also use the BIOS utilities on my Adaptec card to format for verify SCSI drives; you don't even need to boot into the OS for that option.
 
I use a bootable dos usb with HDAT2 for ide and sata drives.

For scsi, I haven't found anything better for testing than the old Solaris format tool, which I used on whole enclosures of disks at once.
 
damian_m said:
Hi... Linux is not a problem, it's my daily os, the problem is getting an old distro to run on a pc old enough to recognise (in the bios) a (say) 240MB ide disk. Or are you saying a modern(ISH) motherboard has no problem recognising a small disk, if it's on a proper PCI multi I/O, or PCI IDE card?
Click to expand...
Shouldn't matter.
 
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