Free hard drive diagnostic tool?

I'm looking for a tool to simply try and read every sector of the hard drive in my iMac.

In the PC world, I simply download the diagnostic tool from the hard drive manufacturer's website, burn it to a cd, boot it and let it run for a few hours. However, I've tried the diagnostic CD from Western Digital (the mfgr. for the HD in my iMac) AND the Hitachi diagnostic CD (known to work with any mfgr. hard drive) and neither will work. Both boot up into DOS, but because of the lack of a BIOS, the software won't run. Specifically, both applications make use of the "A20 gate" (address line) which isn't present on a mac.

Any ideas? The diagnostic test on the Leopard install DVD seems woefully inadequate. It seems to do a few random seeks and thats it.

nando2323 said:

Have you tried researching the different switches that you can use with fsck?

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I think I've found what I need. I burned the Ubuntu Linux install disk, and you can boot off of it as a Live CD without installing anything. Once started up, I opened Terminal where I can use the 'badblocks' program to read/write every block of my iMac's hard drive.

After a couple minutes it found a whole string of bad blocks, which doesn't bode well, and it isn't even 2% through the disk yet!

operator207 said:

I would hope so too, as badblocks is "read/write" -ing to his HDD. As in writing over data.

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I have a backup on my Time Capsule, first time I've had to use it I restored it to an external firewire drive to make sure the restore worked before I went and did a write test on my iMac's internal drive. I have NOT been able to restore to my internal drive, but the external drive worked fine, and I can boot off of it.