How to verify hard drives integrity with Smartmontools on Debian

Installation

sudo apt-get install smartmontools

Test your hard drives

list your hard drives

sudo fdisk -l

launch the test on your hard drives

For example, if you have 3 hard drives as /dev/sda, /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc, run this command lines :

sudo smartctl -t short /dev/sda
sudo smartctl -t short /dev/sdb
sudo smartctl -t short /dev/sdc

As soon as one of these command lines is launch, the response ends with an estimate time remaining before having the result of the analyse.

Verify the integrity of your hard drives

With the same example as above, you will need to launch the following command lines :

sudo smartctl -l selftest /dev/sda
sudo smartctl -l selftest /dev/sdb
sudo smartctl -l selftest /dev/sdc

What is wished is the following “Status” for each of :

Completed without error

You can have more details with the following commands lines :

sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda
sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdb
sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdc

The result make easer to identify a hard drive if errors are logged.

After the line “SMART Error Log Version: 1”, the result is ok if “No Errors Logged”. Otherwise, the number of errors is displayed with the details for each them.