Hard disk problems, what utils should I use to diagnose-ext3

[Tim_Neobard]

I previously posted a problem with my vt6200 laptop, that being that windows kept crashing. I scan disked and found that it crashed @ 75% each time. So I thought I'd load knoppix and and see if I could diagnose the problem.

Unfortunately it wasn't that simple. Knoppix kept crashing (leading me to think it was a motherboard fault)

However, I've bought an external USB caddy for 2.5" drives, filled my empty drive with junk and then copied it off. The disk reported I/O errors.

Someone helpfully suggested I used this command: Knoppix26 nomount noswap. So that's what I did, and I've been using knoppix for about an hour without crashing.

So now I know how to boot without crashing, what can I do to try and diagnose my problems? Anything I can do to try and fix them & worse come to wose, anything I can do to format this in a way that my personal data doesn't fall into the wrong hands when I harrass hitachi for a replacement?

The filesystem is NTFS

[mzilikazi]

I have no idea how to diagnose windows problems w/ Knoppix. You can however use DBAN to erase your drive.

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

If you don't have a floppy you could always use Knoppix to zero the drive like so:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

A word of caution- don't test that command out to see what it does. There is no "are you sure?".