drtest
—
stand-alone disk test program
drtest
is a stand-alone program used to read a disk
track by track. It was primarily intended as a test program for new
stand-alone drivers, but has shown useful in other contexts as well, such as
verifying disks and running speed tests. For example, when a disk has been
formatted (by
vax/format(8)), you can
check that hard errors has been taken care of by running
drtest
. No hard errors should be found, but in many
cases quite a few soft ECC errors will be reported.
While drtest
is running, the cylinder
number is printed on the console for every 10th cylinder read.
A sample run of drtest
is shown below. In this example
(using a 750), drtest
is loaded from the root file
system; usually it will be loaded from the machine's console storage device.
Boldface means user input. As usual, ``#'' and ``@'' may be used to edit
input.
>>>
B/3
%%
loading hk(0,0)boot
Boot
:
hk(0,0)drtest
Test program for stand-alone up and hp driver
Debugging level (1=bse, 2=ecc, 3=bse+ecc)?
Enter disk name [type(adapter,unit), e.g. hp(1,3)]?
hp(0,0)
Device data: #cylinders=1024, #tracks=16, #sectors=32
Testing hp(0,0), chunk size is 16384 bytes.
(chunk size is the number of bytes read per disk access)
Start ...Make sure hp(0,0) is online
...
(errors are reported as they occur)
...
(...program restarts to allow checking other disks)
(...to abort halt machine with ^P)
The diagnostics are intended to be self explanatory. Note, however, that the
device number in the diagnostic messages is identified as
typeX instead of type(a,u) where
X = a*8+u, e.g., hp(1,3) becomes hp11.
The drtest
command appeared in
4.2BSD.