Moving to GitHub, slowly

The software on this pages will slowly be moved to GitHub https://github.com/hilbix/. The CVS repository will be migrated to GIT as well, so the history will be preserved, a bit. See FAQ.

Scylla and Charybdis, diskus - Tools

The tools are developed under Linux with ESR's paradigm release early, release often in mind.
So you can consider this beta software, or alpha, or pre-alpha, or even worse ;)

Have a look in the download directory for all downloads.
As always here, all you get is the source. No binaries here.

diskus 0.6.4-20110729-224557

Disk geometry checking and repair tool

⇒ ⇒ ⇒ The development shifted to another location. All future versions will be published at https://github.com/hilbix/diskus   ⇐ ⇐ ⇐

DISKUS is a high level harddrive diagnostic and limited repair tool.

It checks the disk geometry by writing sectors with a numbered ID to the harddrive. (THIS ERASES ALL DATA ON THE DEVICE!) Later you can verify if the sector-IDs on the disk are still correct, thereby detecting any case where some data was written to the wrong sector (or was not written at all). One example use is to check if some elder SD-card-readers are able to access the second GB - some just overwrite the first GB two times, and diskus will detect such a bug.

Now you can "freshen" the data on your harddrive, too, this will read and re-write the sectors. With modern drives this will re-map all defective sectors. (I needed this new function to successfully revive one of my drives while keeping all data intact.) Note that this option was not thoroughly tested (it was not yet tested with drives with read errors), so if you use this new option, be sure to have a backup (or some filesystem like ZFS which is able to fix any left over data error).

You can also NUL the drive (like dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdwhatever), just checkread it or do a hexdump. Diskus uses O_DIRECT/O_SYNC to lessen memory cache impact and has a little progress meter.

Please note that diskus is no tool to erase your harddrive according to DOD algorithms or write certain bit check patterns or data onto it like dd.

History:

License and Disclaimer All you can see here is free software according to the GNU GPL. Copyright (C)2000-2011 by Valentin Hilbig Note that the software comes with absolutely no warranty of any kind. You use the software at your own risk. Valentin Hilbig cannot be hold responsible for any unintended damage, lost data or malfunction of the software you can find here.