HDD Burn In with Python

[hokieghal99]

Terry Reedy wrote:
> You could also get the assembly coded SpinRite5 (<$100) which will
> systematically read and test every block, including boot sectors, on the
> disk (moving each block of data temporarily to another place while write
> testing).  It also fixes bad formatting and has twice saved a disk for me
> that ScanDisk could not.
> 
> Terry J. Reedy

I've used SpinRite before. An excellent piece of software, but it has a 
few short falls:

Only works on x86.
Only works on fat or fat32 filesyatems.
Very, Very slow because of its throughness.
Has trouble with bigish (> 60GB) HDDs.

If you use Windows 98 with a fat32 filesystem on a smallish IDE based 
HDD... it's a great program, otherwise it's not very useful.