Wednesday, November 4, 2009

New Hard Drive utility in Ubuntu 9.10 - Palimpsest

One of my machines surprised me when I tossed in my Ubuntu 9.10 Live CD recently. After I chose to run the live environment before installing, Ubuntu decided to give me a notification that I hadn't seen before:

It appears that Ubuntu 9.10 has integrated SMART hard drive monitoring into its notifications. I decided to click the icon for more information, since that's what the window told me to do.
At first, the mouseover told me a little info:

Then, clicking the icon gave me more detail:

BAD SECTORS? Oh no! I clicked the message to find out more. It apparently brings up a utility called "Palimpest Disk Utility":

In addition to showing the drives in my system, it also allows me to test the drives via GUI tools:

I don't remember the last time I was happy to see a failing hard drive! Maybe this tool will make it cool to find a hard drive with bad sectors.

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