[LUNI] Testing IDE drives

[Stephan V Bechtolsheim]

What's the best utility to use to test an IDE drive? I don't care about the info that is stored on the IDE drive. I just want to run a program and
get an answer along the lines of "keep" or "throw away".

"badblocks" looks OK to me for that purpose - any other suggestions?

If using badblocks is it worth to first do a "read only scan" before going to mode where blocks are written out to disk and then read back in?
The "read in all the blocks mode" seems to be much faster, but if that skips over more than 20% of the errors that would be discovered with
"write and read", then I am not interested.

Thanks.

StvB